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THE MEXICAN MIND 



The People of Mexico 
Trading With Mexico 
The Mexican Mind 



THE 
MEXICAN MIND 

A Study of National Psychology 

By 
WALLACE THOMPSON 



N ON-REFER T 

i 




SWVAD • a3S 



BOSTON 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1922 



X47 



Copyright, ig22. 
By Wallace Thompson. 

All rights reserved 
Published March, 1922 



Printed in the United States of America 



MAR 15 1922 
:0)CI.A654941 



To 

My Mother 

FANNIE GEIGER THOMPSON 

Who made the living of lifey the loving of my fellow-man, 

and the understanding of both, the polestar 

of my growing years 



PREFACE 

TO its observation of Mexico the world has 
brought almost every element of illumination 
save one, — and that the most essential of all. It 
has neglected the universal touchstone of under- 
standing, older than Solomon; the dictum that 
''For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." Neither 
in our writings upon Mexico nor in our practical 
dealings with the Mexicans, have we sought out 
the fountainhead of all their action and of all their 
failure, — the Mexican mind itself. Here, first and 
last, has been our basic error of approach, the wreck 
of all our desires to help or to use the Mexicans. 

The book which is offered here seeks to remedy, 
in part, this error of the past and to give a ground 
which may help to obviate its repetition in the 
future. Here is a humble beginning of a study to 
which many minds and many years should be 
devoted, — the clarifying of the mutual understand- 
ing of the Latin and the Saxon peoples of the West- 
ern Hemisphere by a frank comparison of the work- 
ings of their minds. 

Of all those who have written of Mexico, or 
indeed of any part of Latin America, not one has 
taken up the vital problem of psychology in any 



PREFACE 

but the most incidental way. Thus this book is 
based upon no source material; it has no '' authori- 
ties" — save the standard works on general psy- 
chology and the stories and illustrations, which 
have been taken wherever they could be found. 

Only my own previous book, ''The People of 
Mexico," ^ may perhaps be regarded as the source 
book of the present volume. However, although 
"The Mexican Mind" is in a way the third of a 
trilogy of studies (the first two being comprised in 
the two sections of ''The People of Mexico, Who 
They Are and How They Live"), it is no more 
closely related to my previous Mexican book than 
it would be to a similar work by some other author, 
— ^if such a book existed. There, as here, I sailed 
forth on uncharted seas; and here, as there, I hope 
only that such light as I have been able to throw 
upon the course will serve to guide those whose 
sailing must ultimately be the hope of Mexico. 

The generous welcome which the critics and the 
public accorded "The People of Mexico" brought 
forth but one serious criticism, and that was of 
failure to delineate a solution for the difficulties 
which were described. And yet there has always 
been but one solution, — the education of the Mexi- 
can mass. All else is but subterfuge and momen- 
tary relief. The details of that educational solution 
which I have now set forth in this book required, 
for their understanding, an exposition of Mexican 
character. Here, then, is that exposition, and with 



1 "The People of Mexico," Harper & Brothers, New York, 1921. 

X 



PREFACE 

it my suggestions of the fundamental bases upon 
which Mexican education must be founded. I hope 
and pray that in some way and some time, ere 
many years have passed, they, or a development 
of them, will be appHed. I can see no other hope 
for a country which I have long loved and to whose 
service all my Mexican books have been dedicated. 

I can, as I say, credit no source material for what 
has been written on these pages. But much aid 
has come to me, in consultation with many friends 
who know Mexico well, in the suggestions of unex- 
plained incidents in many travel books and in such 
reports as have come to my hands. 

Of the many others directly and indirectly con- 
tributing to the book, I want to speak first of my 
old master, Doctor Daniel Moses Fisk, Professor of 
Sociology in Washburn College, whose teachings 
these many years ago laid the foundations for both 
of these efforts of mine. Truly, if ever man were 
the grandfather of books, he bears that designation 
here. 

A word of tribute must go to all those Mexican 
friends whose grave and delightful minds have 
added so much of inspiration (and a word of regret 
when I re-read what I have had of necessity to say 
of their people) ; and of these friends, especially to 
one. Doctor Toribio Esquivel Obregon, a gentleman 
of the most courtly school, and a student of inviting 
learning. 

Of personal appreciation there is one word: to 
my wife, Marian Gilhooly Thompson, who to all 
my books on Mexico has brought not only the 



PREFACE 

wealth of her own observations of the Mexicans and 
of the other peoples of Latin America, but also the 
intuition and understanding which has smoothed 
the rough places and clarified my own ideas. 

Wallace Thompson. 

New York, December 1, 1921. 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAQB 

Preface xi 

I. The Streams of Race 1 

White and Indian Heritages — Irresponsible Indian 
Communism — The Indian's Crisis Carried Down to 
Our Own Time — Adoption of Foreign Codes — "Mexi- 
canization" of the Indian — The Menace of the Yellow 
Tide 

II. The Mexican Temperament 21 

Indian and Spanish Contributions — Creole and 
Mestizo — Physical Environment — Warring Cultures — 
Imitation — The Lie — EmotionaUsm — Standards of Oiu* 
Judgment 

III. Signposts op Custom 46 

Tradition Emphasized by Foreign Codes — Absence 
of Colorful Legends — Domination of "La Costumbre" 
— Archaic Business Customs — PoUteness — Social Eti- 
quette — Mexican Romance 

IV. Playtime in Mexico 75 

Absence of True Spirit of Play — Ancient Indian 
Festivals — List of HoUdays — Celebrations — Bull 
Fights — Social Fimctions — The Theater — Sports 

V. Mexican Culture 101 

Racial Cleavage — Discouragement of Indian Arts — 
Spanish Contribution — ^Architecture — Pottery-making 
— Weaving — Music — Dancing and Folklore — Painting 
— Literature 

VI. The Mexican Mind 133 

Domination of Intellect — Lack of Imagination — 
Absence of Analysis — Empirical Thinking — The Con- 
crete and the Personal — The Sensation-impulse Chief 
Stimulant to Thought — Self-reaUzation 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

VII. The "Emotional" Mexican 150 

Emotional Expression and Mental Direction — Pau- 
city of Instincts — Sex — Fear, Cruelty, Suspicion — 
Honesty — Oratory and Poetry — Humor — Habit 

VIII. What Is Worth While 176 

Decision the Result of Intellectual Valuations — 
Apathy and Other Inhibitions — Types of Normal De- 
cision — AbnormaUties of Mexican Will — Scales of Psy- 
chological Values — Sex, Pride, Honor, Dignity — 
Property Instinct — Desire for a Leader 

IX. The Mexican Crowd 205 

Mexican Crowd Exists on Second of Four Planes of 
Human Social Development — Individual and Group 
Responsibility — Will Organizations Only — Communis- 
tic Groups — Mexican Socialism — Class Groupings — 
Leadership — Like-mindedness of Mexicans 

X. The Cauldron op Politics 235 

Domination of Personalities — The "Iron Hand" — 
Borrowed Systems of Government — Constitution of 
1917 — Revolution Instead of Election — The "Opposi- 
tion" — Mexican Federal States and Democracy — The 
Church in Politics — Mexican Justice — Graft — Obre- 
gon's "Peace" 

XI. Mexico and the World Without 257 

Fear of American Intervention — Diaz and Interven- 
tion — The Monroe Doctrine — Sense of Inferiority to 
Foreigners — Foreign Capital — Liking for Indivdual 
Foreigners — Business and the Outside World — 
Radicalism and Anti-foreignism 

XII. Things Dreamed Of 276 

Mexican Patriotism a Love of the Soil — Lack of 
Respect for History and Ideals — Land — "NationaUza- 
tion" — Inconsistencies Between Professions and Ac- 
tions — Diaz's Failure in Education — The Problem of 
"Socialization" — ^An Ideal of Education for Mexican 
Regeneration 
Index 295 



THE MEXICAN MIND 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

CHAPTER I 

THE STREAMS OF RACE 

TWO great streams have come down from 
immemorial time to the making of the Mexican 
mind, as they have come to the making of the 
Mexican nation. These are the streams of two races, 
white and red, races which in mind and in hving 
were as far apart as the globe which separated 
them. 

The red stream, moving along through ages be- 
fore the white appeared, had become, ere the meet- 
ing, an ocean which covered two continents. It 
was into that ocean that the blood of the white 
stream poured in the two great rivers which swept 
westward from North and South Europe in the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries. In the north 
our Anglo-Saxon river pushed back the red, build- 
ing a wall, a dike, which we advanced by slow years 
ever westward, inclosing those pools of red we left 
behind us, but never mingling. But in the South, 
Spain poured her blood and culture and civilization 
into the red sea, softening its menacing color and 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

crying joyfully in triumph when, here or there, a 
pool paled to European purity. Through three 
centuries this mingling went on, and in Mexico the 
blood of three hundred thousand white men was 
poured into the sea of six million red men to the 
making of what they called a new race, the mestizo, 
or mixed breed. 

Those white men of the heroic age felt, perhaps, 
that they were contributing chiefly their blood to 
the great mixture, but they gave far more. They 
gave the language of Latin culture. They built a 
civilization of great churches and stately palaces 
and broad, square-lying towns. They gave a social 
and political system essentially Spanish and a re- 
ligion which raised the Cross above an area that, 
with South America, was vaster than all the Cross 
had ever shone upon before. They built a princi- 
pality of wealth and power and culture and pressed 
down upon the Indian population a domination of 
ideas which seemed to mark the land for Spain and 
the Church forever. 

Then came that strange sweep of freedom which 
was first an idea in the Europe of the late eighteenth 
century and was next a pulsing reality in that 
mighty outpost of England which lay between 
Boston and Roanoke. The sweep of that freedom 
turned southward, and then Mexico and one by 
one each and all of the Americas fell beneath the 
sway, not perhaps of the idea, but of the fact, and 
kings tottered on their thrones and colonies be- 
came independent empires. The white man of 
Northern America became his own king, for the 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

ideas of freedom were deep in his heart. He and 
he alone fought the battles which were in reality 
but a single battle in the long war which had begun 
at Runnymede. 

But the white man of the South, the Spaniard, 
who for three centuries had bred his blood into the 
soil, raising up his Creole ^ and mestizo sons to carry 
on the torch, fled back to Europe before the storm, 
and the mestizos and their Indian brothers became 
the ^'Washingtons" and ''Jeffersons" and ^'Hamil- 
tons" and ''Lafayettes" of their revolutions. Red 
man turned against white, and for fifty years blood 
flowed Hke water in every land from Florida to 
Patagonia. Then here and there arose great men, 
and especially, in Mexico, one great man, Porfirio 
Diaz, a half-blood Indian, but by some strange 
prank of heredity, a white man in mind and 
soul. 

Diaz ralhed round him that pitiful handful of the 
white Mexicans who remained, the native-born 
Creoles, and with them those hah-blood Mexicans 
in whom the Spanish strain was predominant in 
culture and in their ways of thinking. They built 
them a repubUc that was an autocracy and under 



^ In Mexico the term "creole" is used to signify definitely the 
pure-blood, white descendants of Europeans, most of them Span- 
iards. The term "mestizo" now applies to all mixed Indian 
and white blood peoples, whatever the proportion of the mixture. 
The word "creole" has rather differing meanings in South America 
and also in the United States. The Mexican use, which is followed 
here, is supported by the Spanish Academy, with this further 
limitation that by the literal Academy definition negroes of pure 
African blood are also Creoles. 

3 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

their sway Mexico again became an outpost of the 
white world in Latin America, paralleling in many- 
ways the white lands of Chile, Argentine, and 
Uruguay, far to the south in the temperate zone, the 
home land of the white man. 

Under Diaz, European culture became predomi- 
nant, as it had been in the days of the Spanish 
viceroys, and the mind, the culture of the red man 
were buried once more, buried and all but forgotten 
in the centers of government and learning. Upward 
through that crust of foreign culture there pushed, 
here and there, a mestizo and, at long intervals, an 
Indian, achieving the miracle of adaptation along 
ways ill suited to their strange Indian psychologies. 
Thus some reached, at last, to the light of the white 
world, up walls less scalable, in many ways, than 
those which still shut the American negro from the 
heights of our civilization. 

But milhons of the Mexicans, mixed blood and 
Indian, remained red, and red they are to this day, 
and red they have shown themselves to all the 
world for these past ten bloody years. They do not 
dress in war paint and their tomahawks are great 
long corn knives which readily disembowel their 
adversaries but do not lend themselves to the 
more gentle art of scalp-taking. But Indian they 
are and to-day, behind the flimsy curtain of their 
Spanish language and religion, behind the tattered, 
flapping bhnds of what was once a copy of the 
Ajnerican Federal Constitution, behind the blatant 
Marseillaise of modern socialism, they leap in savage 
war dances and look forward to the day when 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

Indian communism (not Marxian socialism) shall 
rule, when the white man with his mines and oil 
wells shall be forgotten and Indian demagogues and 
Indian priests shall rule their ways and their 
thoughts. 

That Indian culture, if we may so use the term, 
is perhaps the most sinister threat against the 
civilization of the white man which exists in the 
world to-day. Its strength is in its inertia; its 
threat is in the fact that to-day it is the dominating 
factor in the political and social life of Mexico, the 
keystone nation of Latin America. That that 
threat is no mere nightmare the past ten years of 
Mexican history may prove to us. Its danger is 
the greater in the fact that the white man of Europe 
and America finds it so difficult to believe that there 
is even the possibility of this reversion. Our pride 
in our culture, our faith in the subtle power and 
lasting force of the environment which our Spanish 
brothers created in Latin America is so great that 
we are prone to consider the Indian only as a smaller 
brother and not as a grown man capable at least of 
bearing arms and of dying for the things which are 
ingrained in his soul. 

Brothers indeed we may be before Heaven, but 
the Indian differs from the white man in qualities 
more fundamental than mere variation in ideas 
and in the ages of their cultures. White and red 
were, and to-day indeed still are, farther apart than 
any, even yellow and black, in the processes of 
their thoughts and in the ideals of what is worth 
living for and what is worth dying for. 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Although we may feel far away and distant from 
the negro, because centuries of civilization separate 
us, the distance seems somehow only that of cul- 
tural ages, and the mind of the black man and the 
mind of the white man follow the same road. The 
brown man of the Mediterranean seems to speak 
our language, and his culture and ours are one. 
Even the yellow Oriental thinks as we think, and 
we misunderstand him chiefly because he does not 
let us see his mind, because ever is that cloud of 
imperturbable, age-old silence of voice and facial 
muscle which we do not penetrate. But the red 
man, with a lesser cunning than the yellow, with 
a mask of apparent dullness and stupidity, baffles 
us by his very simplicity. We may know the illog- 
ical sequence of his thoughts, we may plumb his 
philosophy till its childishness hes plain before us, 
but still he travels a road which is more than the 
mere path behind us, which apparently swings in 
orbits which know not the planes and verticals and 
ellipses that are ours. East and West may lie far 
asunder, but they meet indeed before the throne of 
common virtues; West and East alike stumble to 
incoherence before the enigma of the Apache, the 
Aztec, the Maya, and the Inca. 

To-day the white world stands as it has stood 
since Columbus first planted the Cross on the Island 
of San Salvador, aloof and afar from' those planes 
of Indian psychology. But, verily, the day is press- 
ing upon us, and it behooves us to take ourselves 
out of the safe shelter of our Abbey walls, where for 
our thousand years we have sat in judgment upon 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

the world, and to find that Indian plane, and, 
finding it, to know it and understand it. Thus and 
thus only will we achieve the civilizing of Latin 
America and in that civilizing the saving of white 
culture in the western hemisphere and perhaps, in- 
deed, in all the world. 

At our hand is Mexico, sick unto death, and be- 
cause of her very illness with her symptoms and 
the processes of her thoughts more open than they 
have ever been to the white man. The way of our 
search here plunges into the untracked jungle of 
Indian and Mexican psychology, a forest into 
whose depths no foreigner has ever penetrated. 
Into it we must go, because only when we have 
passed beyond its edges and glimpsed (even if we 
only glimpse) its massive trunks, its bogs, and its 
twining, cripphng vines, its poisonous, exotic 
flowers, its noxious insects and its savage beasts, 
shall we begin to understand the problems which 
we actually face or begin to approach to their 
solution. 

In that jungle we shall find not only the old, 
primeval growths of Indianism unchanged through 
the four centuries of white rule, but we shall find 
also trees and plants and grasses of transplanted 
Spanish ideals, distorted and adapted by their new 
environment into forms which we shall hardly recog- 
nize, with roots steeped in the rotting atavism of 
the untold millenniums of Indian history. 

The Mexico of to-day is root and stem of this 
ancient jungle. The very physical make-up of the 

population harks back to it. The six million Indians 

7 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

of the fifteen million of the Mexican people are in 
many ways more Indian than the reservation tribes 
of the United States. Of the eight million mestizos 
or mixed bloods, probably two-thirds are Indian 
in physical type and in spiritual and mental tem- 
perament. Nearly twelve million Indian minds in 
fifteen million ! A vast subsoil whose mere existence 
is the most illuminating fact in Mexican life, be the 
observer psychologist, politician, soldier, or a trades- 
man seeking new markets. 

Descended, during unrecorded aeons, either 
through evolutionary processes from the animal fife 
of the very land in which they now live, or wan- 
derers from distant cradles of humanity of which 
they have no tradition, the Indians of Mexico, as of 
all America, remain one of the unique racial prob- 
lems of science. Their historical and psychological 
problems, as well, still baffle our attempts at meas- 
uring them by our own scientific yardsticks. 

In the period of their life which we know, the 
Mexican Indians, like all the peoples of history, have 
had the experience of being conquered and domi- 
nated culturally by men of alien races and higher 
civilization. But in exception to most others, they 
have not and do not now show any sign of the 
growing mentality, broader group-consciousness, 
improved moral and intellectual adaptability which 
have marked other conquered peoples in the five 
thousand years of recorded history. 

They remain much the same peoples as they were 

when the Spaniards came, little changed by white 

rule, essentially barbaric in their modes of thought 

8 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

and in the values which they place upon the factors 
of their life. Like the Indians of old time, the 
Indians of to-day desire nothing so much as to be 
left alone, and the one thing which they fight for 
is to be left to themselves and to their primeval 
communal hfe. Spain discovered early that the 
easiest way to rule the Indians was to leave the 
conomunes to themselves, and to allow their only 
contact to be with the paternal Church and the 
paternal landlord. The viceroys early adopted this 
easiest way, with effects of which we are only to- 
day reaping the full fruits. 

This first and most significant surrender to In- 
dianism by the Spaniards was virtually a re-begin- 
ning of the European feudal system both for the 
Indians and for their conquerors. The feudal age 
was dead in Europe when Columbus sailed, almost 
as dead in Spain as in England. But the feudal 
stage of Indian development was not yet passed, 
and so, in the surrender to Indian demands, feudal- 
ism was revived in Latin America, and that far 
less because of Spanish cupidity than because of 
the immovable mountain of Indian tradition and 
the inertia of Indian psychology. 

Thus, in the beginning, the Indian failed in meet- 
ing his great crisis, — the crisis of his adaptation to 
the higher culture which Spain offered him. In his 
winning the right to continue his communal life he 
carried on to future generations the consequences 
of his failure to meet his new conditions. That 
failure has been repeated age after age and by gov- 
ernment after government, and the crisis of Indian 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

adaptation to the white civihzation which has 
pressed upon him has come down to our own day. 
It is that crisis which faces the white Mexican and 
through him all the white world to-day. For the 
crisis of Mexico is essentially this crisis of the 
Indian, due to his failure, again, in the past decade, 
to meet the crisis of government which has been 
thrown into his hands by the machinations of 
mixed-breed agitators. 

The problem is essentially psychological and 
essentially one which, because of the failures and 
neglect of the mestizos and of the Indians, the 
white world must meet and solve. It therefore be- 
hooves us to dig deep into its psychological bases 
as well as into its historical antecedents. 

Aside from the blame which might attach to the 
Spaniards as a colonizing and civilizing power, 
aside from the fact that the racial amalgamation 
of peoples of such different and distant stocks in- 
evitably produces a lower mixed type, less capable 
than either of the parent races to meet crises, there 
remain certain definite elements of Indian psychol- 
ogy and social organization which stand out men- 
acingly in the Indian history of the past and in the 
Mexican history of the present. 

The first of these is that never since the fall of 

Spanish rule has the scepter of vital power been 

long out of the grasp of the Indian mass. This 

power, animal in its beginnings, and animal in 

most of its manifestations, has owed its control to 

the numerical predominance of the Indian type in 

the population, to the dominance of Indian phys- 
io 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

ical and mental traits in the mass of the mestizos 
and to the greater adaptabihty of the Indian to 
cUmatic and food conditions. 

The second important element is the fact that 
the strivings, the '' ideals" of the Indian are not, as 
our sentimentality would lead us to believe, toward 
democracy and that freedom which we find a need 
of our own souls, but toward the primal com- 
munism which has come down, virtually unchanged, 
from pre-Spanish times, and toward a liberty that 
is hcense, without limit or inhibition. 

This Mexican communism is unique, distin- 
guished from other communal organizations in his- 
tory by an almost complete absence of communal 
responsibihty. A system of common ownership of 
land and other property has existed from the 
legendary era of Mexico down to the modern days 
of Carranza and Obregon, But where in other lands 
with similar communal ideas the sense of responsi- 
bihty on the part of the commune for the acts of 
its members has been a great controlUng and 
educative force, in Mexico there has been virtually 
no such restraint. Normally, the kin or clan takes 
upon itself matters of discipline and control, and 
offenses of any sort against the tribal code are pun- 
ished severely. Not the least onerous of its punish- 
ments has always been, from Africa to Greenland, 
banishment or expulsion from the group, a sen- 
tence which in the kin organizations of all time has 
meant social death, for no other kin will receive a 
pariah. 

To-day in Mexico there are no signs of any such 

11 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

communal responsibility, and, despite the search 
of many delvers into ancient tradition, it is much 
more likely that communal responsibility never ex- 
isted than that it has been outgrown. Savage life in 
Mexico has always been easy. Expulsion from the 
kin relationship has carried no perils of lack of 
food and very httle danger from wild beasts. The 
pariah was always able to find his way through 
friendly jungles, to hve in his own corn patch and 
to make him a new kin of his own. The communism 
of prehistoric Mexico, like that of to-day, appar- 
ently had no other effect on the people than to 
drown individual initiative and in that drowning to 
sink even the initiative and responsibility of the 
clan itself. 

This effect of the peculiar communism of the 
Mexican Indian is itself responsible for the third 
basic fact of Indian psychology, the love of and 
mastery by leaders and personalities. Shirking re- 
sponsibility, the Indian sought ever to find for 
himself masters who would assume it. Before the 
conquest he had been a slave to his self-appointed 
priests and princes, and went to war at the caprice 
and behests of his rulers. In Spanish days he offered 
himself as a weapon and as a tool to the tyrannies 
which the situation nurtured and developed from 
the human selfishness of his new masters. 

This Indian tendency toward irresponsible com- 
munism, and this Indian willingness to shift every 
responsibility to the shoulders of any leader, com- 
bine to perpetuate and to explain the intellectual 
domination of the Spanish element in the outward 

12 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

appearances of the Mexico which we have known. 
This Spanish influence has sought, through all the 
years and all the changing governments of Mexico, 
to destroy Indianism by the expedient of replacing 
tribal and kin relationships with a white national 
ideal. This effort has failed with equal continuity, 
and the root of its failure we find, again, in a psy- 
chological condition which is basically racial. 

Humanity, in developing from communes and 
savage tribes into nations of seK-conscious indi- 
viduals, has always passed through the great mo- 
ment when the ancient customs and superstitions 
have been codified into firm and workable law, with 
practical provisions for change and amendment. 
Until that moment comes, the aegis of tradition 
is the heaviest of burdens and the most rigid of 
tyrannies, for uncodified tradition chains a people 
with unwritten laws as immutable as those of 
Nature herself. And no nation can ever develop or 
ever be solidly founded unless its nationality is a 
growth of its natural and racial heritages. 

Thus we reach the branching point of Mexico's 
political confusion and of much of her psychological 
chaos. The codes and laws under which she lived 
during the three centuries of Spanish rule and upon 
which she built her independence were not the 
codified traditions of the mass of her people, but 
those which had been brought ready-made from 
Spain. They had been impressed upon the Indians 
without adaptation and virtually without their 
absorbing a single one of the dominant traditions 
of the native races. 

13 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Nor did this idea of imposing a foreign code end 
with the effort to make Mexico Spanish. It has 
continued through all her independent history, first 
with an imitation of the constitution and system — ■ 
the code — of the United States, then with borrow- 
ings from France, and most recently with a ready- 
made socialistic constitution, code, and philosophy, 
presented to the Mexican people by foreigners who 
knew httle of their past and were oblivious even to 
the struggle of the moment between entrenched 
Indian tradition and the cumulative cycle of foreign 
imitations. 

Always there has been, on the part of the more 
intelligent Mexicans, a realization — not always con- 
crete — of this eternal battle in the Indian and 
mestizo mind. The Spaniard sought to eliminate 
the conflict by making Mexico white through racial 
amalgamation — a plan whose failure to-day is virtu- 
ally complete. 

Since Spanish times all effort toward harmonizing 
the two elements has been undertaken on the prin- 
ciple that the Indian, as the lower race, must and 
would ultimately chmb to the plane of his more 
advanced brother. This idea has enthroned two 
elements, the theorists who have sought to find 
newer and more beautiful systems of democracy, 
and the demagogues, who have raised up Indian 
armies, one after the other, by promising, each and 
all, the same surrender to Indian tradition and to 
Indian love of loot and of communism as the price 
of Indian support. This hnking of theory and 
demagogy is the condition which we see to-day, 

14 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

and have seen through the century of Mexico's 
independence. 

Increasingly, however, the need of a new method 
has become apparent. We have now reached, 
through slow evolution in our educational systems, 
a reahzation that the duty is upon the wiser brother 
to stoop and hft, rather than upon the lower to 
climb through his handicaps to the higher plane. In 
the United States the years since the close of the 
Great War have seen the development of a new sys- 
tem of reaching the immigrant problem. This sys- 
tem is called Americanization. Its working principle 
is the seeking out, in the unassimilated immigrant, 
of those national or racial traits and traditions 
which can best be adapted to serve and be served 
by American institutions, and upon those traits to 
build both the adaptation of the immigrant himself 
and a broadening of the usefulness and adaptabihty 
of American institutions. This temporary surrender 
of American ideals may not appeal to all of us, but 
it gives an illuminating analogy. Mexico's great 
problem is not unlike this problem of the United 
States, differing chiefly in that Mexico's unassimi- 
lated population has long lived within her own 
borders. In other words, the problem of Mexico is 
the problem of the Mexicanization of the Indian 
mass. 

This idea was first expressed in 1916 by a young 
Mexican archaeologist of the Madero revolutionary 
group, Manuel Gamio. His book, which he called 
"Forging the Fatherland", may well mark the 
point of departure toward a true understanding of 

15 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the whole Mexican problem as a psychological and 
racial issue. In this book he has written: 

Contemporary European civilization has not been able to 
filter into our indigenous population for two principal causes; 
first, by reason of the natural resistance which this population 
offers to change of culture; and second, because we are ignorant 
of the reasons of this resistance. We do not know how the 
Indian thinks; we do not know his true aspirations; we 
prejudge him according to our criteria when we ought to 
saturate ourselves with his own point of view in order to 
understand it. Temporarily we must be able to create an 
indigenous soul; then we may labor for the advancement of 
the indigenous population. Such a task is not the duty of 
the governor, pedagogue or sociologist, but of the anthro- 
pologist, particularly the ethnologist, whose apostleship requires 
not only wisdom and abnegation, but especially does it require 
an orientation and a point of view which are beyond prejudice. 
. . . The Indian will continue in a pre-Hispanic culture until 
he is gradually brought into contemporary civilization. The 
attempt to do this by teaching him religion, clothing him and 
teaching him the alphabet has not got under the skin; the 
soul and body of the Indian are still pre-Hispanic. We cannot 
Europeanize the Indian at one stroke; we should rather 
Indianize ourselves a little to assist in the rapproachment.^ 

This is but the suggestion of a way, but great 
though it be or small though it be, such an attitude 
is itself the most vitally necessary element in the 
solution that must appear. 

For the Indian has come to be a world question 
and he will be considered more and more, for the 
problems of this globe will not be solved without 



Manuel Gamio, "Forjando Patria," Mexico, 1910, page 40. 
16 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

hini. To-day he sits with his tattered Spanish cloak 
of government about him, upon the richest of 
all the unopened lands of the world, an area which 
can support a thousand milhon souls, and will yet 
support them. Of what nature those thousand 
millions are to be is the question that faces, not the 
Indians who possess the lands and may indeed 
become a people capable and worthy of developing 
their heritage, but us, the whites of Latin America, 
of the United States, of Europe. 

The problem concerns us, as life itseK concerns 
us. For the problem is this : that the trend of the 
mightier forces in human affairs is turning toward 
a clearer separation of the white world from the 
yellow, perhaps from the brown world and the 
black. And between them all is the red, the world 
wherein lie the greatest future fields of development 
upon this planet. Until to-day we, the Anglo- 
Saxons, through the great English repubhc in the 
north of the Americas, have kept the whole of the 
red lands of that hemisphere for the whites, and 
the yellow has as yet hardly a foothold. Until now 
we have accomplished this by pohtical and poten- 
tial military force. We have been supplemented 
throughout the century of the Monroe Doctrine 
by the effects of the long-faiUng effort of Spain 
to make the lands of Mexico and Central and South 
America white by the infusion of the blood of her 
white colonists into the Indian and negro mass. 
To-day Spain Ues exhausted, chiefly because she 
sought so mightily to achieve that alchemy, to 
her own heroic impoverishment. To-day, too, that 

17 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

old ideal of racial amalgamation has been broken 
on the immutable facts of human inheritance, and 
the "Latin" lands are slipping back to half-breedism 
and Indianism. 

With that great ally of hope gone from the white, 
the yellow world to-day clamors for a place in the 
untamed southern continent. Only for a little 
while may we hope that our threats can hold back 
the stream of yellow immigration, while our culture 
falls back before the rising sea of Indianism. And 
then, either bloody war or surrender of the fairest 
gardens of the world, not to the red man, but to 
the yellow, — and we shall want those lands, and 
shall have need of them ere this century draws to 
a close. 

There is but one choice, and that is the making 
of those Indians into real, true wards and supporters 
of white civilization. It can be done, for if we do 
not the yellow man will make them yellow, with 
an ease that will startle us, — if we are here to watch. 
And that choice turns upon the uphfting of those 
Indians, those half-bloods, by the understanding of 
their race, their minds, their aspirations, and their 
history, and in the end by a system of education 
that will be the mightiest plan ever devised or ever 
executed by human minds in the history of the 
world. 

The issue is gigantic, and it is imminently press- 
ing. No man can say how soon it must be com- 
pleted, ere the dikes break. And we have not yet 
begun. 

At our hand lies Mexico, and the work of under- 

18 



THE STREAMS OF RACE 

standing must begin in Mexico, because, save for 

the white countries at the southern end of South 

America, she is closest to us, still, in her culture and 

in her ways of thought. Mexico has been a white 

man's country and must yet be. But a white 

man's country where the red man is the true sharer 

of our culture, the true ward of our devotion, not 

a land owing homage to an oppressor, nor yet a 

painted rephca of white civilization. Her own 

white men have led her as best they knew and their 

failures have been the failures of all of us, in an 

era when we understood but little, when education 

seemed to be something that was to be brought 

from above, not something that should be nurtured 

tenderly in the deep soil of hf e and race and thought. 

They know, as we know, to-day, that civilization 

will come as ideas are planted in men's minds in 

ways which they can grasp and learn, and not as 

those minds are forced into alien molds. This is 

the essence of the Mexican problem, and we must 

face these facts of race and of need and failure 

before we can understand either how Mexico thinks 

or what she thinks. Many thousand Mexicans 

have climbed their way to white culture, understood 

it an(J adopted it, and these men, white and of 

mixed blood, can be trusted to lead the way if we 

will but give the means, and if but for a few years 

longer we hold the dikes. 

And Mexico will be a white man's land, more 

truly than she has ever been. Whatever may be 

the turn of the world's history, whatever may be 

the change in the very bases of civiUzation, whether 

19 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

property shall pass away or socialism become but a 
leaven, the problem of Mexico will remain this 
problem of bringing her truly into the white world, 
a problem of planting, of adaptation, of slow 
growth, and slow maturing. 



20 



CHAPTER II 

THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

IN Mexico we stand in the presence of one of the 
great paradoxes of humanity, a people who are 
not a people, a race which is not a race, a culture 
which is not a culture. The Mexican faces the 
world gravely, seriously offering himseK as a 
people distinct and definite, with national ten- 
dencies and ideals, and with a national psychology 
of its own; yet he is not a people, but an agglomera- 
tion of many peoples, with ideals and psychologies 
still distinct and definite within themselves, like 
nothing in the world so much as an impressionist 
painting which blends with distance into harmony, 
yet which close at hand is made up of innumerable 
contrasting colors. 

The Mexican has long sought to convince us that 
he is a race, a new race, and he acts indeed with an 
astonishing unanimity, despite the pressure of one 
or the other element upon his mind and will; and 
yet he is two races, — and a hybrid between the two. 

He offers us a distinct culture which he claims 
as his own, a culture which goes back with naive 
frankness both to the heritages of old Spain and 
to the culture-legends of prehistoric Mexico. It 
is a culture not without definiteness, not without 

21 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

inspiring qualities to the Mexican people and to 
the student from other lands, and yet it is in 
reality two cultures, blended with approximately 
the skill of a housewife making a toothsome — 
but much-mixed — hash. 

Yet this paradox is the very essence of our study, 
is itself the key to our understanding of Mexico. 
That the Mexicans actually are a distinct and rather 
definite people we must quickly admit. That their 
culture has certain qualities of unity we shall find. 
But the claim that they are a new race we must 
dismiss, for that is only a heritage of our own 
sentimentalism over the melting pot of the United 
States, transferred to the darker, more limited 
field of Mexico.^ 

The culture of Mexico and the national tem- 
perament of the Mexican people of to-day are 
essentially a culture and a temperament of conflict. 
This conflict is the battle between Spanish individ- 
ualism on the one hand and Indian communism 
on the other. Each has affected the other tremen- 
dously, but each has left a definite, clear racial 
tinge which stands out against the confusions of the 
merging. 

The primary strain, the Indian, brought to the 
mixture and to the consequent cultural conflict 
many psychological elements as well as racial 
heritages which will appear in the phases of Mexican 

1 The race question of Mexico, its historic background, and the 
present tendency of the mixed bloods to resolve themselves into 
their component racial parts, with the Indian type predominating, 
is discussed in the author's "The People of Mexico", Book I, 
chapters i to iii. 

22 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

life which we shall take up. They are too deep a 
part of Mexican psychology to be separated from 
it under the observation of to-day. Suffice it here, 
then, to set down a few of the colorful phrases of 
one of the world's greatest observers, Alexander von 
Humboldt. His characterizations of the Indians 
as he saw them in the closing years of the eighteenth 
century may be taken as the earliest scientific 
analysis of the Indian, an analysis whose truth 
to-day is its own proof, aside from the great prestige 
of its author. He writes: 

I know of no race of men who appear more destitute of 
imagination (than the Indians of Mexico). When an Indian 
attains a certain degree of civiHzation he displays a great f acihty 
of apprehension, a judicious mind, a natural logic and a par- 
ticular disposition to subtilize or seize the finest differences 
in the comparison of objects. He reasons coolly and orderly, 
but he never manifests that versatility of imagination, that 
glow of sentiment, and that creative and animating art which 
characterize the nations of the south of Europe and several 
tribes of African negroes. ^ 

The music and dancing of the natives partake of this want 
of gaiety which characterizes them . . . their songs are terrific 
and melancholic. The Indian women show more vivacity 
than the men.^ 

Without ever leaving the beaten track, they display great 
aptitude in the exercise of the arts of imitation, and they 
display a much greater still for the purely mechanical arts.^ 

The taste for flowers undoubtedly indicates a relish for the 
beautiful.^ 

The families (of Indians) who enjoy the hereditary rights of 
cacicasgo (feudal power), far from protecting the tributary 

1 Alexander von Humboldt, "Political Essay on the Kingdom 
of New Spain," Book II, chapter vi, page 170. 

2 Ibid., 171. 3 Ibid., 173. * Ibid., 174. 

23 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

caste of Indians, more frequently abuse their power and in- 
fluence. . . . Exercising the magistry in the Indian villages, 
they levy the capitation tax; they not only delight in becoming 
the instruments of the oppressions of the whites; but they 
also make use of their power and authority to extort small 
sums for their own advantage. . . . When the Spaniards made 
the conquest of Mexico . . . the cultivator was everywhere 
degraded, the highways . . . swarmed with mendicants.^ 

Recent examples ought to teach us how dangerous it is to 
allow the Indians to form a status in statu, to perpetuate their 
insulation, barbarity of manners, misery, and, consequently, 
motives of hatred against the other castes. These very stupid, 
indolent Indians who suffer themselves patiently to be lashed 
at the church doors appear cunning, active, impetuous, and 
cruel, whenever they act in a body in popular disturbances. ^ 

Momentarily, let us add notiiing to these phrases, 
selected out of Humboldt's rich record, a record 
which stands to this day as one of the great interpre- 
tive documents of all time, almost the only un- 
challenged analysis of the Mexican people in any 
language or in any age. 

To the relatively simple Indian conception of life, 
expressed in their communal organization and in 
the combination of resignation, melancholy and 
treachery which Humboldt described, the Spaniards 
brought as high a culture as the Europe of their 
day could boast. They came not as on private 
enterprise, seeking religious freedom (or markets 
or materials), as the English colonists went to 
Northern America, but as agents and proteges of 
the central government. They were individualistic 

^Alexander von Humboldt, "Political Essay on the Kingdom 
of New Spain," Book II, chapter vi, pages 179, et seq. 
2 Ibid., 200. 

24 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

in their personal ambitions, but the State was 
always behind them and their greatest possible 
achievements were personal wealth and positions 
in the hierarchy and the government, — individual- 
ism at its most concrete. 

That individualism was the source of the pride, 
the arrogance, the self-assertion of the conquerors. 
It was the source of the love of adventure which 
brought them hither and of the self-consciousness 
which dramatized every phase of their battles with 
the Indians. It made the astonishing and often 
ludicrous contrasts which, like scenes from Don 
Quixote, marked the life of the Spaniards in Mexico, 
the combination of the "lordly haciendas and their 
barren seignorial halls, the combination of their 
pride of birth and their tattered garments, the com- 
bination and the contrast of their oppression of the 
Indians for workers, erected on the Indian civiliza- 
tion they had destroyed."^ 

Of the impetus of that Spanish influx we have, in 
history and in the Mexico that we see to-day, in- 
numerable evidences. The stream of humanity and 
of culture which swept westward from Spain was 
in volume and in quahty in no way comparable to 
that which sailed to New England from north 
Europe. In numbers it was far greater, for three 
hundred thousand Spaniards went to Mexico alone 
during the colonial epoch. In quality this emigration 
averaged well, but it was the quality of high adven- 
ture and of priesthood rather than the quality of 

^Cf. F. Garcia Calderon, "Latin America," New York, 1913, 
pp. 29-43. 

25 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

democracy. It gave to the Indians something of 
those traits of mastery which the Indian communism 
invited, an often kindly and always strong mastery 
which sought to solve, in its rough, mediaeval way, 
the problems of existence for the communes and 
the communal Indians. 

The Spanish influences have, however, undergone 
vital changes, not only in the Indian and mestizo 
adaptations, but in those of the actual white de- 
scendants of the Spaniards in Mexico to-day. 
There, as in all Latin America, we find in the Creoles 
a "Spanish" racial and psychological type which is 
in many ways most unlike the types and the psy- 
chology of Spain. Certain fundamental bases re- 
main, but many virtues and perhaps a few faults 
have been lost in succeeding generations. The 
Spaniards of colonial days who came as governors 
and as officers remained essentially Spaniards, while 
the native-born whites, like the native-born mesti- 
zos, held an inferior rank in the social caste system. 
These Creoles developed throughout Latin America 
a distinctive method of thought. Back of them were 
the long history of Spain, the Roman laws, the 
Catholic Church, Latin cultural ideals. There were 
Spanish pride and Spanish individualism and Span- 
ish grandeur, but through them all shone and 
shines to-day a wide-swept spirit of separateness, a 
lordly affection for the land of their birth, a paternal 
bond, almost like that of a family, with the Indian. 

The white man of Mexico who is in exile to-day 
in the United States and in Europe is homesick, 
not for the cities and the hills of Spain, but for the 

26 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

towering mountains, the broad plateaus, and the 
eternal summer of Mexico. These men and women 
are part of Mexico while they are at the same time 
part of the white culture of Spain, just as the true 
American of the United States is, although Amer- 
ican, a part of the white culture of England. 

It is not this modern Creole to whom is to be 
traced the origin of the mixed bloods of Mexico, 
moreover. Save for the inevitable mesalliances 
which come between the youths of different races 
in any land where there is close contact, there is 
not to-day any great infusion of Creole blood into 
the native strain. The origin of the mestizo goes 
back to the very deliberate amalgamation with the 
Indian which may be considered, in a way, as an 
actual ideal of the original Spanish colonists. Fired 
with religious zeal for conversions, encouraged by 
the Spanish Crown in the contraction of legal and 
even illegal marriages and in the breeding of sons 
to be educated to carry on the rule of Spain in the 
New World, the forming of the mixed-breed castes 
was far more than a mere series of indiscretions by 
the soldiers of the conquerors. 

Spain herself had outlived many invasions and 
in absorbing the blood of her enemies, from the 
Roman soldiers down to the Moors, had gained 
many of the characteristics which made her great. 
Thus the conquerors came to Mexico with a mixture 
of bloods and heritages which may be justly re- 
garded as a primary cause of their idea of assimilat- 
ing the Indians by breeding with them. But these 

old strains, mingled in Spain, did not have the 

27 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

chaotic results which their own mingling with the 
Indian brought to Mexico. The reason is simple 
and is now definitely recognized. The peoples which 
met in Spain were not of greatly different type; 
all were of the white or closely allied races, and 
the union of each new strain produced, at first, 
more virile peoples than the parent stems were 
creating. In Mexico, however, the race with which 
the white Spaniards sought to merge was farther 
away from their own than any other that could 
have been found. The result was what could now 
be anticipated, a people inheriting the worst traits 
of both and burying the virtues of both deep be- 
neath the skins darkening ever to the lower type, 
with minds which do not seek even the natural 
goods of the poorer of the two elements. 

The two great races, then, have formed not only 
the background of the psychology of Mexico to-day, 
but have been themselves largely affected by the 
combination which has resulted from their physical 
union. Working upon those factors, however, was 
and is yet another — the Mexican environment. 

Few lands are more definite in their physical 
contour, few are more powerful in the force of 
climate. This environment has worked on Indian 
and white and mestizo, but upon the Indian it has 
acted for unnumbered generations, fashioning the 
race type into its definite forms, a genuinely con- 
structive force, just as a sculptor's chisel upon his 
marble is a constructive force. Upon the white 
man, however, the environment has been acting 
but four hundred years, definite, powerful, indeed, 

28 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

but utterly destructive, breaking down those vir- 
tues, those ingrained quahties which he brought 
with him from the cradle in which he was himself 
nurtured for his own unnumbered generations. 

No man can know, even as he looks into his own 
heart, of the influence of earth and sky and water, 
of mountains and of sea upon his soul and its de- 
velopment. Buckle found in the unscalable heights 
of the Himalayas the source of the hopeless philoso- 
phy of the Eastern Indian, and in the easily con- 
quered mountains of Europe the urge and the 
confidence which drove the white man to world 
mastery. The mountains of Mexico, the vast up- 
heaval of the backbone of the land, the appalling 
deserts in the north, the dank jungles in the south 
have a definite effect, to-day, upon the foreigners 
who travel there and upon those who live there. 
It seems that they must have had a tremendous, 
unceasing influence upon the Indian races to whom 
those mountains, those deserts and those jungles 
were all their outlook and their life from the days 
of their first ancestors. 

Of the climate which is in great part the result 
of that very physical contour, there is something 
more definite to say. It is a cruel climate, despite 
its tropical luxuriance, and it is cruel to the Indians 
as well as to the whites. Inadequate rainfall makes 
the raising of crops difficult, save in sections where 
altitudes or humidity or heat are equally powerful 
depressants. Mexico lies chiefly in the tropics; her 
most salubrious sections are at a height of a mile 
or more above the level of the sea; and nervousness 

29 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

or apathy are the frequent results of heat and alti- 
tude. Physical and mental vitality are at low ebb, 
and sickness stalks the land, in good years and bad, 
while uncertain rainfall brings famine again and 
again to a people whose climate is ever inviting 
them to ease and laxity. Few Mexicans are really 
well, and undernourishment, nervous and digestive 
diseases ravage the country through winter and 
summer, through war and peace. ^ 

The factors of race and climate are the matrix 
and the mold of -all humanity. No people show 
more clearly than the Mexicans the influence of 
both in those strange ways of human alchemy which 
interact in the creation of that phase which we call 
temperament. 

To the formation of the Mexican temperament 
there have been brought not only the direct forces 
of race and climate, but certain powerful secondary 
factors of the social system which those two have 
built. Of all these, perhaps the most potent is the 
isolation which separated the three races and the 
various castes and classes through old time and 
continue to separate them to-day. The white Creole 
of Mexico only partially understands the Indian 
mind, and if anything the mestizo understands the 
Indian less than does the more cultured white. 
On his part, the Indian understands neither the 
white man (whom he calls strange names which 
have lost their original significance and mean merely 

1 The climate and health conditions of Mexico are treated more 
fully in the author's "The People of Mexico", Book I, chapter v, 
and Book II, chapter i. 

30 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

opprobrium and hatred) nor the mestizo, whom he 
looks down upon as a half-breed, and calls a 
"coyote." 

The culture of each element is strange to the 
other, and even the mestizo, with the chaotic 
mixture of white and red traditions and instincts 
which is his cross, considers himself as a being 
apart, broader in his wisdom of the practical world 
of his own people. He expects no one to under- 
stand him and resents the most casual suggestion 
that he has anything to learn. The Indian lives in 
a realm of his own, silent, half-thinking, perhaps. 
Moving side by side with his mestizo and white 
brothers, he might be all the thousands of miles 
away from them which his instincts and traditions 
indicate. 

All this may seem fantastic and exaggerated to us, 
but if we realize that this condition exists in the 
United States to-day, and that the thoughts of 
the negro freed-men hardly ever wander into the 
realm of things which occupy even the most 
meagerly trained white minds, we need not seek any 
other examples to explain or to vivify this fact of 
racial isolation. 

So with the great extremes of poverty and com- 
fort. In no land in the world is there a greater 
contrast between the hopeless misery of the lowly 
and the mere comfort of the well-to-do. All the 
forms of psychological isolation are present in 
Mexico, all the walls which shut men away and 
apart from one another and create those conflicts 
in the unity of the whole which are the tragedy of 

31 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

all social history. Yet in that isolation there is 
still group relationship, still the working, by what- 
ever devious ways, of the various elements upon 
one another and upon the other groups of race or 
caste or wealth. 

Perhaps the most significant development in the 
individual through this group conflict has been the 
appearance of imitation as an outstanding mental 
and temperamental characteristic of the Mexicans. 
The search of each lower group for the springs of 
authority in the higher have led to a worship of 
authority and a system of imitation of authority 
which have affected both individual and group life 
to an astonishing degree. 

Indeed, all foreigners who have been successful 
in the training of Mexican workers have begun 
with imitation and have sought to develop their 
proteges from imitation into some semblance of 
originality, using the fact that their imitation is 
reproductive rather than assimilative. A peon 
carpenter, for instance, will create a piece of furni- 
ture from a photograph in an illustrated magazine 
where he would find himself absolutely baffled in 
an attempt to assimilate by example or through 
description the creative process of the original 
maker of the article. The experience of the 
National Railways of Mexico in the training of 
skilled native mechanics by careful instruction 
where apprenticeship under foreign workmen had 
been a virtual failure is a striking example of this 
phase of Mexican thought. 

Even the upper classes are imitators of things 

32 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

European and American. The French fashions 
affected by the women of Mexico are essentially 
impractical for the Mexican climate, but they are 
followed with an unadapting, doglike subservience 
unknown to the women of any other nation. The 
culture, too, of the upper class is Spanish or an 
imitation of the French, and the influence of 
European artistic standards has always been a 
serious drawback to the development of native arts. 

Politically, the imitative quality of Mexican 
temperament has led to strange developments 
of government. One of the severest criticisms 
which is made against Mexican statesmen, past 
and present, is their imitation of foreign politi- 
cal forms, rather than their adaptation of them 
to the needs of the Mexican people. The constitu- 
tions of Mexico have all been imitations of foreign 
types, mostly American, and the socialistic docu- 
ment of 1917 was of far greater interest to the 
radicals of Germany, France and the United States 
than it was to the Mexicans whom it purported to 
benefit. 

In business, also, the Mexican shows a decided 
tendency to imitation. A Mexican is inherently 
opposed to embarking on a venture which is either 
new to him or new to the country. Foreigners, 
therefore, have been allowed to take the lead in 
practically all industrial progress, after which 
Mexican capitalists and business men have fol- 
lowed with similar enterprises. 

Innate conservatism is yet another controlling 

element in the Mexican, and particularly in the 

33 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Indian, temperament. But one idea at a time 
seems able to possess his mind, and when he 
changes his opinion, it is not necessarily because he 
has weighed the two plans against each other, but 
because the new idea has crowded out the old 
simply by displacing it upon the track of his mind. 
It often seems as if in no other race were there such 
stubbornness and adherence to ancient practice, 
incomprehensible to the outsider and yet a force 
which has to be recognized and dealt with in every 
contact with the people. The Indian's reasoning 
power is influenced and seems indeed dominated 
by this conservatism. Witness the story of the 
Indian who for years continued planting a plot of 
ground which was subject to floods which year after 
year destroyed his crop, — because he had once got 
a famously rich return from that bit of property. 
The recognition and acceptance of authority, 
the desire to have another take the responsibility 
of choice, is a trait of temperament linked closely 
with imitation and conservatism. The Indian is 
happiest when he has a real jefe (or chief), but he 
demands sincerity or the appearance of it in those 
to whose authority he looks, although if sincerity 
calls for a show of weakness in withdrawal from a 
position once taken, authority quickly loses its 
power. Fidelity to a master and devotion to the 
master's cause may be said to be characteristic, — 
if the master and the cause maintain their position 
and dominate the native respect. Childlike as the 
Indian is in so many ways, in none does he demon- 
strate it more completely than in his real love for 

34 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

the strong, even the harsh, hand, if his shrewd 
appraisal assures him that that firmness is based 
upon fairness and a ''square deal." 

It is perhaps this same intellectual valuation 
which makes the typical Mexican thought process 
so personal. The Mexican at work can be handled 
with ease and efficiency if the personal side is taken 
care of, but if it is neglected he will shirk and no 
bullying or force will drive him on. 

The Indian from his savage personalism and the 
mestizo from the defensiveness which is characteris- 
tic have developed a keenness and cunning which 
nurture the suspicion which also colors their 
thought processes. There are many towns in one's 
travels over Mexico which object to harboring a 
stranger even for a single night. An offer of money 
for entertainment is very likely to arouse immediate 
opposition, not because there is any objection to 
money in return for hospitality, but because the 
natives cannot understand why anyone should 
come to them with money unless he has designs 
against them. Cunning themselves and prone to 
take advantage, they are naturally afraid of the 
stranger. They suspect new forms of taxation; 
they fear being forced into military service or that 
they may be carried to work on distant plantations. 
This suspicion is not manifested solely toward 
white men, for there are long-standing feuds be- 
tween tribes and villages of their own people. 

A Mexican will not always trust another Mexican 
with a secret, either personal or business, even 
though he knows him well. He prefers, when he 

35 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

knows foreigners, to confide in an American or 
Englishman. This is manifested in the real lack 
of cooperation in business and social enterprises, 
where suspicion of their fellows takes extremely 
definite form. 

This suspicion, this lack of cooperation, seems to 
permeate Mexican psychology. The story is told 
of Villa, the bandit "general", that he trusted no 
one, and when he had gone alone into the country 
with a faithful companion, he would separate from 
that companion before carrying out the definite 
purpose of his trip. The first night alone he in- 
variably built a camp fire and then rode away from 
it into the hills or the brush to throw this faithful 
friend off the track, in case he had taken it into his 
head to follow. 

At base, this suspicion is one of the great charac- 
teristics of the Mexican temperament, rather than 
merely a kink in the process of reasoning. It is the 
heritage of temperament from the long processes 
of indirect thinking, — in other words, of intellectual 
dishonesty. 

The lie stands out as one of the flaming charac- 
teristics of the Mexican. Of all the unhappy 
tendencies of his life, this taken alone would of 
itself explain almost all of the misfortunes of 
Mexico as a nation and of the Mexicans as individ- 
uals. Upon this characteristic we need not judge 
from a purely foreign viewpoint; Mexicans them- 
selves have written and talked of it. One of the 
great students of his people has expressed it in these 
words : 

36 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

The evil which has tainted all our social life, the microbe 
which has been weakening our organism, and which if we do 
not definitely attack it, will finish by destroying Mexico, is 
the lie. 

Many will perhaps laugh at this conclusion, announced with 
so much formality, because unfortunately we ourselves have 
reached the point of minimizing that infirmity, of making a 
joke of it, or taking it lightly. We are able informally to 
cast it aside, and in a moment of good humor to say to a friend 
that he lies, and he laughs and all who hear us laugh. 

In the United States the word "lie" cannot be used as a joke, 
as in Mexico there are words which cannot be used as a joke, 
because they touch the foundations of susceptibility. This 
Anglo-American susceptibility to the word "lie ", imported from 
England, symbolizes a great moral step in the elevation of 
character. It is not that the Anglo-American or the English- 
man is not accustomed to lying; it is that they hold the lie 
to be the worst of degradations, and if they incur it, they 
cannot endure having others discover that they harbor that 
loathsome perversion. ... It is necessary to feel oneself high 
and strong indeed to adopt the truth as a line of conduct; 
but at the same time the truth prevents our allowing our 
pride to seduce us, for it places us ever in the presence of 
reality, which is the whole world of our conditions and our 
limitations, and brings to us the sensation of being atoms in 
all that does not touch our dignity.^ 

The lie, or rather the living lie of lack of unity 
between the professions and actuality, has played 
its part in every phase of Mexican history and plays 
it forever in the mazes of Mexican psychology. 
There are many failures in the understanding of the 
foreigner and the Mexican, but the lack of appre- 
ciation of this solemn fact of the disparity between 
words and deeds goes deeper than any other. We 

1 T. Esquivel Obregon, "La Influencia de Espafia y EE.UU. 
sobre Mexico," Casa Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 1918, pages 95-97. 

37 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

seek to arouse in the Mexican that sense of truth 
which has been ingrained into us — and we fail; and 
unless we learn better, we never know why it is 
that we fail. 

Now, lying and deceit, as the passage quoted 
above indicates, are not particularly grievous crimes 
to the Mexican mind. We appeal to truth and we 
do not get it, and that is all, unless we become nasty 
about it. But there are other words, indeed, that 
have their deep meaning to the Mexican. And one 
of these is the word '^ shameless." 

As a curse, nothing is a deeper insult than telling 
a Mexican that he is sinverguen^a or shameless. 
Here we touch the root of a characucristic of the 
Mexican temperament which is peculiarly his own. 
Honor and dignity are the prized virtues, even 
though honor may to us seem a trifle empty without 
truth. Still, ''honor" is a great idea and a great 
shibboleth even to the mestizo who will steal your 
last cent and tell you smilingly to your face that he 
has never been within half a mile of you or your 
property. It is even a noble word to the soldier, 
who will not quit before action, but will retire in 
the midst of battle, in order to save his honor, 
which would be wronged indeed if he remained to be 
beaten. For honor to the Mexican means prestige; 
and cheating in games, in war and in business is to 
him but the maintaining of his honor, — his prestige 
and prowess. 

Neither lying nor honor, for that matter, have 

very much relationship to the religious ideals of 

the people, and here the Mexican temperament 

38 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

differs radically from most others. The ethical 
side of religion is almost lightly regarded, and the 
fmiction of the Church is chiefly, to the aveiage 
Mexican mind, to furnish manners and to sanctify 
certain important functions of life, as birth, death 
and marriage. The so-called ''religious" wars of 
the early nineteenth century were concerned not at 
all with the religious question, but solely with the 
right of the Roman Catholic Church to enjoy the 
revenues it once paid the king. Many of the traits 
of temperament and character which are being 
hsted here will come up in other sections for dis- 
cussion, but the question of religion, even to the 
question of morality, belongs exclusively on the 
plane of ingrained temperament. 

Religion, so far as it was a factor before the 
introduction of Protestantism about fifty years ago, 
was a utilitarian measure, accepted as having little 
to do with the relations of men to each other, and 
hardly more with their relation to Deity. The 
Mexican is by temperament emotional, but he is 
not very much concerned with either of the ''great 
commandments" which touch upon man's relation- 
ship to his fellows and to his god. As we shall see, 
those are factors which belong on planes of social 
psychology to which the mass of the Mexican people 
have not yet attained.^ 

The emotional phases of the Mexican tempera- 
ment are perhaps best described as being essentially 
on the emotional plane as such, and hardly at all 

^ See chapter ix, "The Mejdcan Crowd," and chapter xi, "The 
National Ideals." 

39 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

attaining to the rank of sentiment. Humanity's 
animal inheritances — fear, self-assertion, sex and 
greed — are all developed to their fullest in the 
Mexican, and indeed so strong are they that it is 
to their gratification, and to their original stimula- 
tion, for that matter, that most of the forces of 
the ordinary Mexican intellect are devoted. 

The self-seeking, destructive concentration upon 
personal ends, which so often seems to be the over- 
whelming factor of Mexican thought-life, has roots 
far back in the temperament of its individuals. It 
was inherited from the Spaniard, perhaps, but was 
intensified by the Indian, whose communism is 
after all but the group cohesion found equally in a 
pack of wolves or a herd of sheep. Hope of per- 
sonal gain furnishes the mainspring for such en- 
deavor as the Mexican puts forth. And yet when 
we find ourselves making such sweeping condemna- 
tion, memory brings up a thousand examples of true 
altruism, shining through the clouds of personal 
selfishness. Devotion there was in the leaders of 
the land, during the Diaz epoch at least, and 
devotion there has been in the unselfish heroism of 
many Mexican individuals. We can never forget 
that Juan Garcia (a name comparable in its lack 
of identity to our English John Jones) of Nacosari, 
a railway engineman, who deliberately hitched his 
locomotive to a burning train of dynamite and 
drove at full speed until he was far away from the 
town, so that the explosion which would have 
wrecked hundreds of houses and killed thousands 
of people found him as its only, its deliberate vic- 

40 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

tim. But these are the glorious exceptions, the 
rift of light which, like the rainbow after the storm, 
gives promise of what may yet be, and which, 
through the devotion of just such men, and of them 
alone, may in actuality yet come to characterize 
Mexico. 

But for all this altruism and this concentration 
upon self as well, there is apathy. Forever the 
lack of ambition for aught save idleness; forever 
the promise of "manana " and the great things of the 
morrow, — these drag upon the wheels of such prog- 
ress as might be. Race, climate, food, perhaps 
explain it all, but apathy remains, an infirmity of 
the will, an inability to stir out of that helpless 
drifting which, when there is no reasoned purpose, 
is all there is of human volition. Apathy remains, 
outstanding as a characteristic of Mexico, a part 
of that choice which, after all, is the beginning and 
the end of those things which create and support 
the standards of living and thinking which are 
themselves our temperament. 

These, briefly, are the factors of Mexican tem- 
perament which have grown from Mexican tradi- 
tions and Mexican thinking. But these traditions 
and thought-processes loom behind and beyond 
temperament, and still beyond is the group life 
which is the truest indication of thought and feeling. 
Temperament is indeed the crystallized thought of 
generations, but the thinking of to-day is more 
vitally important, and the decisions of to-morrow 
will affect us and the world more vitally. 

From the subject of temperament our observa- 

41 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

tion branches out into varied fields, to tradition 
and culture and play, and to the processes of 
thought and emotion and then at last to the action 
of the group. To our eyes when we have Hved 
in Mexico, or to our ears when we have never seen 
her, they have come through the medium of our 
own prejudices, of our experiences. We are in- 
clined to judge them with a firm Anglo-Saxon as- 
surance that they sprang from the same states of 
mind which would have created them in us. 

Herein lies perhaps our greatest error in all our 
study of Mexico. As we picture them, the com- 
munities of Mexico are New England or Enghsh, 
Welsh or Scottish villages, their life some sort of 
undeveloped English, or at most French, cycle of 
birth and growth and death. We conceive the 
Mexicans as hiding beneath brown skins minds 
much hke our own and valuing such abstractions 
as liberty and financial independence much as we do. 
We compare the Mexican revolutions to the up- 
surgences of our English forebears, seeking the right 
to five and to enjoy their beloved freedom. It is 
thus that we seek to interpret all the manifestations 
of Mexican politics, to explain all the unpleasant 
features of Latin-American demagogy. It is be- 
cause of this that we believe all which is told us 
of the idealistic reachings of the poor down- 
trodden Mexican for the things which have been 
written in our hearts but which the Mexican pro- 
tagonists use but as words and symbols. 

But this we cannot do, if we truly and honestly 
wish to see Mexico clear. It is doubtless true, as 

42 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

scientific psychologists have long since told us, 
that the various races of men, the various ages of 
men think in the same way; that the same waves 
of consciousness break the monotony of the surface 
of the mental sea of all men. But it is not true 
that the same sequence of impressions follow upon 
equal stimulus in the minds of Frenchman, Amer- 
ican, Indian and Mexican. And most decidedly it is 
not true that the various races or the various nations 
place the same values upon the good things of life or 
upon the various virtues of the common human mind. 
What is worth while to a European is very likely 
to seem utterly preposterous and useless to a 
Thibetan or to a Persian or to a Mexican Indian. 
The most thoughtless of us will readily admit that 
the things which the Mexican Indian or the Persian 
values are preposterous in our eyes. Our failure is 
in not recognizing that the situation is the same 
when the Indian or Persian regards those things 
which for us, on our plane, are the most worth 
while of all the gifts of the gods. 

Let us, then, look at the Mexican from his own 
standpoint. Let us take the indices of his thought- 
life as they are presented to our observation and see, 
not what we ourselves would feel to create such 
activities, but what the Mexican feels and thinks. 
Therein we shall find ground upon which to rest 
our mental feet. 

One other phase of Mexico on which we are Hkely 
to be led astray is the question of the mestizo 
psychology. The vast majority of the Mexicans 
are of mixed breed, Spanish and Indian, and this 

43 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

confusion of bloods has wrought an appalling con- 
fusion in the minds of these strugghng millions. 
As noted at the opening of this chapter, their pitiful 
effort has been to convince the world that they have 
created a "new race", a wonderful new people, with 
the intelligence of the Spaniard and the endurance 
of the Indian. To us as we watch them the only- 
result of the mixture is the conflict, the weakness 
and the ineptitude of the half-breed type in every 
race. 

It has become something of a custom among ob- 
servers of the Mexicans to explain all that is dif- 
ficult to understand on the ground that it is the 
"half-breed cropping out." With this the serious 
student need have no traffic. Half-breedism, under 
the modern conception of racial inheritances, is 
significant chiefly in the selections which it makes, 
physically and mentally, from the parent stems. 
Here and here alone its conflict and chaos are 
manifest. The half-breed's failure is in his almost 
inevitable habit of selecting the worst traits of both 
his ancestors and burying their virtues so deep 
that even his distant descendants never unearth 
them. This tendency is a physical fact, and its 
effect on the national psychology is to emphasize 
the importance of the race divisions rather than to 
give us ground for eliminating the idea of race 
from our observation. 

For this reason, little will be found in these pages 
to comfort the rabid Indiophile or the sentimental 
distorter of the sound expressions of modern 
anthropology as set forth by such scholars as 

44 



THE MEXICAN TEMPERAMENT 

Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.'^ Half- 
breedism is not of itself the significant thing, 
any more than it is the great racial crime. The 
significant element is the tendency which half- 
breedism brings into the higher race group, the 
tendency downward to the worst of the lower race 
which is brought into the citadel of racial purity. 

Let us go forward then, free to see the Mexican 
as he is, and let us not gloss over the facts of his 
racial and psychological tendencies by lumping 
them under an easy label of ''half-breedism." 
Mexico is Indian and she is Spanish; her mestizos 
have harmed her only in that they have weakened 
the higher element without adding strength to the 
lower. The red fine of race runs clear, through 
all the tangled web of psychology, as it runs 
through the heaving bulk of all human activity in 
Mexico. 



^ C/. Madison Grant, "The Passing of the Great Race," New 
York, 1916, and Lothrop Stoddard, "The Rising Tide of Color," 
New York, 1920. 



45 



CHAPTER III 

SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

THE yoke of custom lies upon the Mexican with 
a weight almost inexplicable to the American 
or European. The harness of past ages binds him 
from the cradle to the grave and waits grimly upon 
his children and his children's children. No single 
fact of life or of psychology is so permeating. 
Custom rules in the very highest classes of Mexican 
society and it utterly dominates the life of the 
lowest. The Mexican mind works from tradition 
as its primary basis, and the traditions which in- 
fluence the Mexican's daily life are unchanging. 
In lands of different blood and newer cultuie the 
traditions of the crowd may change from day to 
day; there are newspapers, there are the changing 
standards of civilization, the advances of govern- 
ment, new and pleasant novelties which tempt the 
taste and influence the mind. In Mexico there is no 
change; the standards of a thousand years ago 
are the standards by which the Indian mind judges 
the events of to-day; the standards of mediaeval 
Spain are still the standards of the mestizos and the 
Creoles. 
The psychology of the Mexican mind depends 

upon these traditions. Its standards of value are 

46 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

primarily the values of tradition ; its relentless logic, 
which carries it from any premises, true or false, 
to inevitable conclusions, is the logic of tradition, 
inexorable and unquestioning. This tremendous 
force of tradition in Mexico is explicable on a 
ground which has been noted above. The code 
of life, of government, of law, is not the codified 
tradition of the Indians who predominate in the 
population, but of their Spanish conquerors. The 
crystallization of tradition into the national code 
which, as in our own Anglo-Saxon history, has 
become the safety valve of our individual as well 
as of our national living, is almost entirely missing 
in the Mexican's equipment for life. His traditions 
are active elements in all his mental processes, 
which in large part again accounts for our dif- 
ficulty in understanding and evaluating his dif- 
ficulties aright. 

With us, tradition and custom are, at their worst, 
but products of the bad mental habits of our 
ancestors. In Mexico we have a condition anal- 
agous to the primitive peoples who actually live 
by the tribal oracles and the directions of medicine 
men and witches. 

The Spanish code indeed rules in government and 
has been conformed to the life of the upper classes 
and to the life which they have so long and so 
faithfully sought to teach the Indians and lower 
mixed-bloods to accept. But the Spanish code 
fits but ill the life and the climate of Mexico, nor 
have its obvious adaptations been adaptations to 
the real life and spirit of Mexico and its native 

47 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

races. It dominates the living of Mexico without 
touching the Hfe of Mexico, as when the Indian is 
forced to wear woolen trowsers (which he rents 
by the day) in the towns instead of the white cotton 
'^pajamas" to which he returns when he leaves the 
city gates. 

Thus has come that war of the codified tradition 
of the Spaniard with the ingrained customs of the 
Indians, a battle that is at the very heart of the 
cultural chaos and psychological confusion of the 
Mexican. The cohesive qualities which in other 
peoples mix with moral and intellectual tradition 
and with the social system to the welding of a 
nation out of a wandering people have been utterly 
absent from Mexican history, and the unification 
of the Mexican nation has come, as we have seen, 
from the homogeneity pushed down upon the 
Indians and conquerors alike by the social system 
of distant Spain. Whether we apply to Mexico the 
test of the dictum of Buckle that progress in 
national life is due to improvement in the intel- 
lectual tradition of a people, or Kidd's contention 
that it is due to the improvement in the morality 
of a people we meet alike the same unanswerable 
enigma, the absence of any intellectual or moral 
tradition (codified tradition) which has any close 
relationship to racial history or climatic en- 
vironment. 

Thus, while the laws of Mexico are Spanish, the 
traditions of the masses are Indian, and we find 
two basic conceptions affecting all the stream of 
tradition which makes up Mexican life. One is 

48 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

the deep belief, common to all savage peoples, in 
the ways of their ancestors. The other is the 
communal conception of life and the communal 
standard of the virtues which Spanish individual- 
ism has warped and changed in astonishing ways. 

The former manifests itself in the inevitable 
answer of the Mexican of the lower classes to any 
question about anything which he may find himself 
doing: "Es la costumbre^' ("It is the custom")' 
The other has its most important and significant 
survivals upon this same great plane of custom. 

In that eternal conformation to tradition and 
reverence for custom, there stands out in relief one 
most interesting fact. This is the almost total 
absence of any truly significant folklore and the 
relatively little superstition. Tradition has long 
since given up the transmission from father to son 
of the tales of great chieftains and kings and wars 
and glory, and to-day no Mexican who has not read 
it in books knows anything of the history of his 
people and little of the history of his country. 
This astonishing condition, found elsewhere among 
unlettered peoples only in the lowest races, seems 
due primarily to the lack of imagination which is so 
thoroughly a national characteristic. It was ag- 
gravated, however, by the activities of the mis- 
sionary priests of the colonial days, who destroyed 
so much of the written history of Mexico and in 
their zeal for conversion transmuted virtually every 
pagan deity into a Christian saint. To-day the 
legends old mestizo or Indian story-tellers recount 
to sympathetic listeners are tales of the early days 

49 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

of Spanish Mexico, and almost never, so far as 
record goes, of the true Indian days. The precious 
legends of the City of Mexico are all concerned with 
miracles of saints, ghastly crimes and avengirg 
ghosts, and one and all are placed in Spanish colonial 
times. And when, by good fortune or great tact, 
one can get a country Indian to recount his local 
legends, one finds that they deal with the sounding 
of the bells of acolytes in the depths of mountains, 
with the wonderful apparitions which have been 
seen by holy folk, or with the miraculous appear- 
ances of sacred pictures in growing trees or on 
ancient rocks. 

Little more encouraging to the antiquary are the 
superstitions of the Mexicans. These are many, 
some delightfully quaint and some truly beautiful, 
but all of them harking back more to Spanish 
tradition than to native spirit. There is a certain 
amount of witchcraft, concerning itself chiefly with 
the casting of spells, and tiny wax images are sold 
to the faithful with proper charms, so that a pin 
stuck in any spot in the anatomy of the image 
will be reflected in the discomfort of the person 
bewitched, — all forms common to savage peoples. 

As for any truly significant tradition (outside the 
Church) on the ''supernatural" plane, it simply 
does not exist, and a heavy sense of the drab com- 
monplace is all one gains in the search for any 
flash of imagination among the superstitions of the 
native Mexican. 

But the bonds of custom remain, for custom is 
the duU twin brother of superstition, and its bond- 

50 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

age is unrelieved by imagination or by any search 
for freedom from its toils. It touches all the details 
of Mexican life, the very plan of her cities, the very 
architecture of their houses, the dress of her people, 
the food which they eat.^ 

The bond of custom to ancestral precedent holds 
primal importance, too, in the ways of work and 
in the procedure of business. 

To this day the children of a carpenter become 
carpenters; the sons of a cargador (the public porter 
or carrier), though they be a dozen in number, 
will grow up to be cargador es. This is still truer in 
the native industries where the makers of rehosos 
and baskets, of pottery and of laces follow their 
fathers and mothers in the ancient family trades. 
Inefficient methods of work, scorn for modern con- 
veniences and machinery, even the fierce opposition 
to new comforts are explained sullenly or solemnly 
by the unanswerable argument, "Es la costumbre." 
An Indian will load one of the side baskets on the 
back of his burro with grain and fill the other with 
stones ; he will trot to market with a load of pottery 
in a great frame upon his back and when he has 
sold his stock, will take his way home with the 
frame filled with a load of stones; and to all 
protests he will reply that this is the way his 
fathers did before him, and that they were intelh- 
gent and worthy men. 

Sellers of American steel plows in Mexico will 
argue with a native Indian purchaser on the merits 

1 Cf. "The People of Mexico," Part II, chapters ii, v, vi, vii, 
vni, and ix. 

51 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

of a deep blade which will cut the earth a foot below 
the surface with no more effort on the part of the 
oxen, but the Indian will buy the steel plow which 
looks most like the crooked stick which his father 
and his grandfather used before him, and when 
he gets his plow to his little farm he will saw off 
the left handle because the plows of his ancestors 
were guided with but one hand. For centuries the 
Mexican Indians have transported earth in woven 
baskets carried by a harness across their foreheads, 
and many American and English engineers who 
were engaged in the early railway construction 
in Mexico tell how, at the first introduction of 
imported wheelbarrows, the Indians insisted on 
removing the wheels and carrying the barrows on 
their backs. 

Whole villages will, conforming to tradition, 
manufacture nothing but baskets, or nothing but 
pottery, although other necessities of their simple 
life may have to be brought for many miles from 
the market places to which they trudge to sell their 
own surplus product. 

In fact, custom has rather more to do with busi- 
ness methods in Mexico than have enterprise and 
efficiency. The distribution system in vogue in the 
country is probably the most archaic in a world 
in which distribution everywhere lags behind manu- 
facture. Before the Spaniards, Mexican business 
was practically all done in the market places, and 
this was a custom to which the Spaniards brought 
little change. The most glowing descriptions of 
the conquerors had to do with the fairs and market 

52 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

places of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital which was 
located where Mexico City now stands. Cortez 
reported that sixty thousand people assembled 
daily in these markets and that every fifth day 
as many as one hundred thousand were to be seen. 
Business was carried on largely by barter; foods, 
animal and vegetable, cooked and uncooked; 
native fabrics, coarse or fine, in the piece or made 
up into garments; precious stones, ornaments of 
metal, shells and feathers; implements, building 
materials, matting, baskets, furniture, medicines, 
herbs and pottery were all to be found in the same 
market place. Everything was sold by count or 
measure, and barter was almost the only means of 
exchange, although gold dust in transparent quills, 
tin and copper in T-shaped pieces, and grains of the 
cacao or chocolate plant were standards of value 
and passed in exchange. The Aztecs were great 
traders and carried their products to distant prov- 
inces where they were exchanged in the fairs and 
markets, so that Aztec pottery and jewelry is to 
this day to be found in the ruins from one end of 
Mexico to the other. Under the Aztecs there were 
no beasts of burden, and all products had to be 
carried on human backs, a limitation to trade so 
great that one of the marvels of the Aztec civiliza- 
tion is that it grew to such proportions without the 
aid of four-footed animals. 

The inheritances of Aztec custom mark the busi- 
ness of Mexico to this day. While the larger cities 
are always well supplied with a variety of foods, 
this is largely due to the fact that the distributors 

53 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

either themselves or through their agents go out 
into the country to buy, and themselves transport 
the supplies into the central markets. In the 
smaller towns, however, there are often sudden 
shortages of various supplies; for the Indian, who 
often travels fifty or sixty miles with his load of 
chickens, or vegetables, or baskets, is unaffected 
by the demands of the market, and goes only 
when he has enough goods to make a load or when 
he happens to be in need of funds. In fact, the 
market has been since time immemorial so much a 
social center that the Indian will neglect his crops 
or his manufacture to take a small load of produce 
to a fair in order to sit surrounded by his family 
before an infinitesimal stock spread out before him 
on a mat, his chief object to watch the life of the 
fair and to gossip with old friends and new ac- 
quaintances. 

These tiny stocks of goods are always amusing, 
and the nonchalance with which a country Indian 
will sit for hours behind his tiny display of useless 
wares is one of the charms and pities of Mexico. 
Except in the great cities the Indian tradesman 
much prefers to sell his goods in single pieces or 
small lots to disposing of his entire stock. The 
story is told of the effort of an American in the 
hot country to buy the entire product of broom 
corn of a neighboring village. His offer was 
promptly refused, and the only satisfaction he 
could get out of his explanations that the offer 
guaranteed a greater return than the Indians could 
make from spending months in the hand manu- 

54 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

facture and sale of brooms was that if they sold all 
their stock at once they would have nothing to do 
for the succeeding months. Residents in the 
suburbs of Mexican towns know that an Indian 
di'iving a flock of a dozen turkeys (with the charac- 
teristic long whip with which the birds are herded 
Hke sheep) will promptly refuse an opportunity 
to sell the entire lot. He is willing to sell one or 
even two, but he is going to market, and he is not 
going to be cheated out of his day in town. Women 
vendors in interior villages will not sell their stock 
of eggs, for instance, except by the mano, that is, 
the hand, or five pieces at once, and if one wishes 
to buy five dozen eggs, one must buy twelve manos, 
paying for each mano in coin of the realm as it is 
counted out. Often where varied products are 
bought from the same market woman, each article 
must be paid for singly. This may well be due to 
the ignorance which makes multiplication or 
addition impossible, but it is more likely traceable 
to a perfectly sound custom which decrees that 
eggs shall be sold by the mano and that each product 
shall be bought by itself. 

Bargaining is the rule in Mexico as in other lands 
where primitive peoples are engaged in trade. 
This is probably due also to the ancient heritage 
from the days of barter when both the product 
bought and the product sold were influenced by the 
law of supply and demand. The fact remains, 
however, that as a rule the Indian vendors, and 
indeed the proprietors of the shops around the 

market place, will ask from fifty to a hundred per 

55 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

cent, more than they are willing to take for the 
articles on sale. 

Originally the stores in a Mexican city were all 
grouped about the plaza and even the finest goods 
could be bought in tiny holes-in-the-wall. While 
in the larger cities this custom later gave way to 
large department and specialty stores on the main 
streets away from the market, in essence the Mexi- 
can shop remains as it has remained for centuries. 
The exterior gives but little indication of the goods 
to be found within, and save for the blankets, the 
dresses and the trinkets hung on nails in the door- 
way (more for decoration than for display), almost 
no effort is made to tempt the buyer to enter. The 
thick walls of the Mexican buildings and heavy 
shutters of wood or iron inclose most of the desirable 
products from the view of the possible purchaser. 
This is partially due to the ancient and still preva- 
lent fear of theft, but it also harks back to the 
personal element in intercourse in Mexico, which 
takes its forms from communal relationship. In 
Mexico one buys from one's friends and seldom 
is a sale consummated without a pleasant conversa- 
tion and exchange of the amenities and gossip 
between proprietor and purchaser. One enjoys 
being greeted cordially and by name by the pro- 
prietor of a shop, and although prices, even for 
staple articles, have always varied from door to 
door, the Mexican is so loyal to his friends that he 
seldom trades outside their circle if he can avoid it. 

The foreign shops in Mexico only emphasize this 

condition of Mexican trade, and it is largely because 

56 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

the French, the Germans, the Spaniards and the 
Syrians understand and work upon this personal 
element in the Mexican purchaser that they are the 
foreigners who control most of the retail trade. 
Most grocery stores in Mexico are run by Spaniards, 
and their willingness to treat even the humblest 
peon who buys a centavo's worth of salt with 
thorough courtesy, combined with efficiency of 
management, made their success possible. The 
Germans, who control the hardware trade, cater as 
they always do to local custom, and the humblest 
Indian from the mountains feels perfectly at home in 
the elegant hardware stores of the metropolis, where 
young German clerks, who have pored over Spanish 
grammars by night, meet them, talk their language 
and serve them efficiently.' The French dry-goods 
stores, with their French and Mexican clerks, 
elaborate of manner and indifferent to trade, seem 
the ablest of all foreigners to give the Mexican 
women, from the most exclusive ladies to the 
humblest peon, the pecuhar attention which custom 
has made them desire. 

The Mexican clerk is often criticized for his 
nonchalance, for his debonair dishonesties and for 
his cigarette smoking on duty. But always there is 
a subtle understanding of class, a subtle patronage 
of the woman in a reboso and a subtle deference to 
the lady with a hat which fits him pecuharly for the 
work before him. 

Following a venerable custom, Mexican stores 

are closed for the noonday siesta from 1 to 3 p.m., 

and no foreign bustle has ever been able to eradicate 

57 



■Hi^- 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the custom. On the other hand Mexican stores 
open as early as 7.30 or 8 o'clock in the morning 
in the smaller towns and seldom close before 7 or 
8 at night, — as much of a concession to the climate 
and custom as is the noonday siesta. 

Supplies, not only of food, but even of the more 
staple needs of life, are bought for the day only. 
A few centavos worth of sugar, a centavo of salt, 
five centavos of coffee, one or two eggs, the day's 
potatoes, green vegetables and meat fill the market 
basket of the cook, and a single spool of thread 
and barely enough cloth for the purpose intended 
are purchased by the seamstress or the housewife. 
There are practically no charge accounts, and 
business, even before the uncertainties of revolu- 
tion, was done largely on a cash basis. Checks are 
seldom used in trade, and in the old days when 
paper money made the handling of large sums easy, 
a middle-class Mexican often carried as much as 
a thousand or two thousand pesos on his person. 
Banks are used only by large concerns, the com- 
mon people having but little confidence in them, a ' 
prejudice which the disastrous financial history of 
the Carranza regime apparently justified. 

The Indians and the lower peons have always 
preferred pesos duros (hard dollars) or gold to paper, 
and the problem of transporting gold and silver 
coin to distant villages and camps was serious even 
before the recrudescence of banditry following the 
1910 revolution. 

One of the few developments of modern business 

in Mexico has been the purchase of goods by mail 

58 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

order and on the installment plan. The install- 
ment business was started long ago by the Amer- 
ican sewing-machine manufacturers who for years 
have had their agents covering the country on 
horseback, selling sewing machines on installments 
of three pesos a month in the most distant villages. 
More recently other enterprising foreigners have 
gone into the business of selling brass beds — always 
a sign of social standing in Mexico — phonographs 
and chromos on a similar installment plan. 

The ancient industry of producing life-size 
crayon portraits of deceased relatives and delivering 
them in beautiful gilt frames has long flourished in 
Mexico. In a land where there are practically no 
savings and where the wages are so near the sums 
actually required to keep body and soul to- 
gether, it would seem that the installment business 
might encounter difficulties, but the experience has 
been that the possession of a chromo, sewing 
machine or brass bed gives such cachet to the 
owner that the fear of losing it drives him to any 
means of meeting the payment when the installment 
collector makes his rounds. 

Mail-order buying grew extensively during the 
time of Diaz. The American mail-order houses 
published their great catalogues in Spanish and 
scattered them from the Rio Grande to Patagonia, 
and every American traveler in the interior villages 
has had the experience of a surreptitious call from 
some young Mexican who has watched him pass 
on the street and who wishes to inquire more fully 
regarding the value of the articles catalogued and 

59 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the method of ordering. Before business conditions 
were entirely upset by the recent revolution, 
Mexico City houses were doing an increasing mail- 
order business. Advertisements filled the Mexican 
papers and catalogues almost as elaborate as their 
American prototypes were sent broadcast in re- 
sponse to many inquiries. 

Mexican politeness is found in business life not 
less than in social etiquette. The genesis of busi- 
ness custom goes back to Spanish times and to 
Spanish traditions, many of which- are preserved 
more conscientiously in Mexico than in Spain 
herself. In entering a store or an office no one is 
too busy to say "Good morning," or if he knows 
the proprietor personally, to stop and shake hands, 
while the members of both families are inquired 
for individually. In business correspondence the 
forms of ancient courtesy are maintained scrupu- 
lously, and even to this day a formal business letter 
from a Mexican firm will be signed, — instead of 
"yours truly" — with the alarming array of in- 
itials, S. S. S. Q. B. S. M., which means, "Su seguro 
servidor, que besa su mano," hterally translated, 
"Your faithful servant, who kisses your hand." 

The traditional background of Mexican living 
and thinking has, indeed, this other side, wherein 
the social amenities are of vital importance, and of 
which the forms of business procedure, pleasant 
though they are, are only a reflection. Standing 
out like a bright flower against the background of 
much that is unlovely, the social relationships of 
the Mexicans and the social customs which make 

60 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

up their enjoyment of life are always a delight to the 
observer. 

At the very foundation of the entire system of 
social procedure we find a custom, a virtual cult, 
which is so deeply grounded a part of Mexican social 
and business life that it is comprehended by few 
foreigners and is given no emphasis at all by the 
Mexicans, — ^for to them it is hke clothes and food, 
one of the things that have always been. The 
reference is to the relation of compadres or co- 
fathers which is at the basis of Mexican social 
intercourse. It is the binding element in Mexican 
friendships and a survival to-day in succinct form 
of the communal and kin relationships of the In- 
dians, for to all intents and purposes it is the 
virtual adoption of ^'blood-brothership" which is 
the characteristic of most savage societies. Modi- 
fied from Spanish forms, it has been raised in 
Mexico to a cult of social union which influences 
and beautifies all business and social relationships. 
Technically, a compadre (co-father is the literal 
translation) is one who has been a godfather to one 
of your children, who has been associated with you 
as godfather of another child, or who is the father 
of a child to whom you have acted as godfather. 
In other words, compadres (a comadre is a woman 
in the same relationship, but the tie is much less 
binding and in actuahty has more a courtesy value 
than the close bond of the compadres) are those who 
are associated as fathers and godfathers of the same 
children. 

It is no small thing to be invited to be the god- 

61 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

father of a child in Mexico. There is considerable 
expense in the baptismal ceremony, the baptismal 
dress of a child is always elaborate, and the festival 
is in keeping with the social and financial stand- 
ing of the family, — and all of these expenses the 
godfather is expected to pay. Therefore no Mex- 
ican will ask any but a true friend or patron to 
assume the expenses and responsibility coincident 
to this formal creation of the compadrazco. The 
relationship of compadres therefore does not begin 
nor does it end with the baptism. The friendship 
is very close before the invitation to become a god- 
father is extended, and the sealing of the bond 
practically makes the compadre a member of the 
household. The relationship is complicated by the 
connections of other compadres with each other, 
so that in a Mexican family with many children the 
outsider, foreigner or Mexican, who is not a com- 
padre, may well feel that he is outside the inner 
circle, no matter how courteous or how cordial his 
hosts may be. 

The relationship of compadres reaches beyond the 
household. Little clubs or ''circles" have their 
basis in this relationship, and the business patronage 
of a middle-class Mexican household is very likely 
to be determined by the compadre relationship with 
the shopkeepers of the town. The links that bind 
Mexican friendships are therefore not only deeply 
rooted but far-reaching, and in this relationship is 
to be found the explanation of much of the social 
etiquette, many of the business customs, and not 
a little of the general ceremoniousness of the 

62 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

Mexican which at first seem senseless to the for- 
eigner. It is a human bond between men which 
transcends blood ties and transcends even the 
appearances of brusqueness and rudeness on the 
part of Mexicans toward strangers. It has its 
ramifications into the paternal relationship of the 
various classes, for often an hacendado or a patron 
becomes the godfather of children of his employees 
and so binds the family to himself and himself to 
his retainer with links whose roots we may bhndly 
seek in race or in government systems. 

All the relationships which characterize the 
social and business unity of Mexicans have their 
reflections in the politeness which is so famous a 
tradition of their country. Psychologically, po- 
hteness had its orgins in accepted inferiority, and 
it seems obvious that the so elaborately fixed and 
recognized social scaling of Mexico and the sureness 
of position which such a scaling alone can give were 
the origin of the courtly courtesy of Mexican peon 
and gentleman alike. 

In an earlier day this courtesy was universal, but 
since the upheavals of revolution and socialism 
much of the innate politeness of the peon and 
Indian has disappeared. But the Mexican gentle- 
man still retains his charming manners, and in home 
and office is ever the courteous, gentle host, what- 
ever his real sentiments toward his visitor may be. 

The courtesy between men begins in the city 
street and on the highways of the country. A 
Mexican gentleman always takes off his hat to 
another, shakes hands upon meeting and upon 

63 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

parting, and where there has been a long absence, 
embraces his friend first over the right shoulder 
and then over the left, patting the back and shak- 
ing hands once more as the ahrazo is broken. In 
the country every passerby is spoken to, the usual 
form of salutation being "Adios" C'Good-by", or 
literally, "To God" or ''God be with you"), the 
peon or Indian in other days almost invariably 
removing his hat as he speaks, and even mumbling 
"Con su permiso" ("With your permission") as he 
trots on his way. This courtesy is not only from 
superior to inferior, and vice versa, but between 
equals. Politeness was ingrained in the Mexican 
by churchly training and tradition, although the 
forms have of course no more meaning than similar 
expressions in English or any other language; the 
elaborateness with which the courtesies are per- 
formed and the charm of the words themselves give 
a touch of picturesque formahty which is always 
impressive. 

It all adds to the pleasure of living in Mexico and 
places in the hands of every one, high or low, a key 
which opens every pathway, for no matter how 
dense a Mexican crowd, no matter how apparently 
engrossed in their own affairs, a simply murmured 
''Con permiso" will open the way for anyone, be 
he peon or elegant lady. The etiquette of the high- 
way is as fixed as are other traditions in Mexico, 
and no peon who is not in his cups or a "socialist" 
would think of passing upon the inside (next the 
wall) of any person of higher social state, and always 
a gentleman gives way to a lady or to an older man 

64 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

on the narrow sidewalks which line the Mexican 
streets, for the inside next the wall is the place of 
vantage and so the most desirable side of the walk, — 
there is no right or left rule of passing save for 
vehicles. 

Mexican social etiquette is founded upon a 
courtly tradition which gives first place to women 
and to older men, and which receives the friend 
with effusive courtesy and strangers with dignified 
pohteness. The embrace is common in Mexico 
between men, and between women the kiss upon 
the right cheek and then the left is a custom always 
followed, the younger woman or the social inferior 
kissing the cheek offered by the other. 

Inside a Mexican house the courtesies are ob- 
served with the most meticulous adherence to 
tradition. At every doorway there is a protest 
as to who shall go first ; in the drawing room there 
is always a pohte waiting for the designation of 
seats by the mistress of the home. The formal 
arrangement of the room, with the sofa in the middle 
of the longest wall and one armchair at right angles 
at either end, gives opportunity for social distinc- 
tions which the Mexican lady uses with instinctive 
breeding. The place of honor is the sofa, the 
hostess sitting in the left corner and the most 
important guest at her right, while in order the 
armchair at her left and the armchair at the right of 
the sofa are filled by other visitors. 

The formalities of introduction never vary, the 

host begging the permission of the more important 

person to present the less important, and the latter 

65 . 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

responding by stating his full name, in response to 
which the other does the same. This is varied only 
regarding women, who do not repeat their names. 
The famous courtesy of the host's presenting to the 
visitor the house and all within it is, needless to 
say, only a formahty, although should an unin- 
formed foreigner happen to accept the gift of a 
jewel or a book which he had admired, the old- 
fashioned Mexican would insist with unanswerable 
courtesy upon his actually taking it away, an 
insistence which springs both from tradition and 
from his desire to save his guest embarrassment at 
whatever cost. 

There are, however, limitations to Mexican cour- 
tesy, and seldom is the foreigner allowed to pre- 
sume upon it, for the social group in which a 
Mexican moves has definite limitations and is 
broadened only at his own choice. Foreigners who 
come with letters of introduction are effusively 
greeted, often entertained at cafe or club, but sel- 
dom are they introduced into the home life of the 
Mexican. In fact, the opening of the home is a 
courtesy which is so guarded as to be a very true 
sign of complete acceptance of a friend. Mexican 
gentlemen may know each other in a club, in busi- 
ness, and even at dances where both their famihes 
are present, but unless a friendship has been built 
up between their wives or their daughters, neither 
will be invited into the home of the other or intro- 
duced to the ladies except in the most formal 
fashion, and then only if circumstances provide the 
occasion. 

66 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

There is comparatively little informality in social 
relationships in any case, and, save for the inter- 
course of young girls, Mexicans of either sex seldom 
drop in informally upon their friends. Large family 
parties or formal dinners are the normal social 
functions of Mexican life, and, although there is no 
lack of fun of the most wholesome sort in such 
affairs, everything will have been carefully and stu- 
diously prepared before the guests arrive. 

The Mexican women Hve in a cage of custom. 
Never, whether married or single, will they appear 
in pubhc with a man to whom they are not related. 
Their escort is either father or husband or brother, 
and always their relationships with other men are 
on the most formal terms. In the colonial days 
and in the early time of the independence, no 
Mexican lady would go shopping unless accom- 
panied by an older woman member of the house- 
hold, and even now Mexican ladies never go on the 
street alone; if they go to market they are accom- 
panied by a servant to carry the packages, and if 
they go shopping in the stores they usually go with 
a woman friend who, however, need not be an older 
chaperone. At night they go out only when accom- 
panied by one of the men of their family. 

Although to a certain extent the barriers have 

been broken down, still to-day women of even 

middle-class birth look askance at employment in 

stores or offices. Unless they enter a convent, the 

older unmarried women live on with their father or 

mother, and when these have died continue to move 

about from house to house as the guests of their 

67 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

married brothers and sisters. Servants have always 
been cheap in Mexico, and every family of any 
means whatever has one or more. Mexican ladies 
therefore seldom perform any household tasks, al- 
though the management of a Mexican establish- 
ment with its host of usually incompetent servants 
is a problem which brings out all the considerable 
executive ability of the Mexican woman of the 
upper classes. They do, however, take a personal 
interest in the maintenance of their wardrobe, and 
every Mexican woman is an excellent seamstress or 
embroiderer. 

It is interesting to note just here that in Mexico, 
somewhat in contrast to other lands, it is the young 
unmarried women who receive most of the atten- 
tion, and the young matron is relegated immediately 
upon her marriage to the rank of her mother and 
grandmother, so that she is seldom seen again at 
social affairs except seated with the chaperones and 
accompanied by her husband. 

Much of the social life of the women in Mexico is 
taken up in promenades or carriage and motor rides, 
the hold of tradition being so great that even to- 
day prominent Mexican families maintain their 
horses and carriages for the afternoon promenade, 
while using automobiles for every other purpose. 
In the smaller towns the life about the main plaza 
is part of the routine of social activity. Two or 
three evenings a week and every Sunday afternoon 
the band plays and the public walks around, the 
women and children accompanied by men in one 
direction, and the single men in another; in some 

68 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

places there are four lines passing simultaneously, 
two made up of the middle and upper classes, and 
two of the peon and servant classes, but in each the 
women walk one way and the men another, so that 
they are able to speak and smile if they are ac- 
quainted or to watch each other, presumably unob- 
served, if they have not been formally presented. 

It is here that Mexican romances traditionally 
begin. The Mexican girl has been trained from the 
cradle to discretion, and as a corollary to extreme 
skill in flirtation. Under the eye of a watchful 
duenna she will pass and repass a certain young 
man upon the plaza a dozen times and each time 
will flash a smile from the eyes in response to his 
equaUy covert salutation. When, after a few or 
many evenings upon the plaza, the youth finally 
separates himself from his companions and follows 
her home, she wiU, before she retires, step to the 
window and look out through the curtain to see 
him standing against the wall of the house across 
the street. Later she will let him see that she is 
watching, and before very long this ''playing the 
bear" has developed to a conversation through the 
parlor window. 

This window has been barred from ancient times, 
presumably to keep thieves from entering, because 
it opens directly upon the street, but perhaps more 
likely in order to lengthen the Mexican romance 
with its tantalizing nearness. This phase of the 
romance — conversation and hand-holding through 
the bars into the late hours of the night — continues 
for two or three months at least, sometimes much 

69 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

longer. Then either the father or uncle of the young 
man, or sometimes one of his boy friends, approaches 
the father of the girl, explaining the young man's 
prospects and possessions and requesting permis- 
sion for him to pay her formal court. If accepted, 
he is brought to the house by his ambassador, is 
formally presented, first to the father, then to the 
girl's mother and aunts. Finally he is introduced 
to the girl as if he had never known her before, for 
in theory he has not. Thereafter the courtship is 
carried on under the eyes of the family, although 
sometimes, if the chaperone is kindly, there are 
moments when they are alone within the house; but 
usually the only privacy the two have is through 
the bars at the street window at which he still 
stops on his way home after the formal call; and 
the family or some member of it is always in the 
room, even when the girl is talking to her novio, 
or sweetheart, through the bars as he stands on 
the street. 

All this is the result of rigid custom, although 
with the somewhat greater freedom now allowed 
in the attendance of young girls, properly chaper- 
oned, at general dances, the possibilities for ac- 
quaintance are greatly widened. Marriage follows 
close upon the formal "introduction" and encour- 
agement of the young people. To the marriage the 
girl of good family sometimes — but not always — 
brings a dowry. The young man, on the other hand, 
defrays the entire expenses of the ceremony down 
to the bride's very trousseau; in the selection of this 

it is perhaps unnecessary to explain that he is 

70 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

usually assisted by his sister, mother or aunt. The 
wedding is as elaborate as the groom can afford 
and is always followed by an extensive party in 
which all the relatives of both sides, not to mention 
the compadres and their families, take part. In 
Mexico the upper classes are married both by civil 
and religious ceremony, the former taking place 
either at the office of the judge the day before the 
marriage or made a part of the wedding reception. 

After a Mexican woman is married her hfe abnost 
inevitably assumes the daily round through which 
her mother and her grandmother and her great- 
grandmother have passed before her. Children are 
expected and come with the regularity of each new 
year, their christenings and later their confirma- 
tions being the chief events of their mother's life, 
although as Mexico is a Catholic country the chris- 
tening, of course, takes place before the mother is 
able to attend. The first christening is the occasion 
when the friendships of the father's youth are sealed 
by inviting his best friends to act as godparents, 
the baptism being followed by an elaborate festival 
and announced afterwards by cards sent out by 
the godfather and always accompanied by a coin 
of gold or silver emblematic of comfort and the 
assurance of support to the godchild. 

Life in Mexico is full of quaint customs, the festi- 
vals which mark the Church year and which cele- 
brate the historic anniversaries of the nation all 
having their special functions and ceremonies. 
Birthdays, saints' days and family anniversaries of 

every sort are generously celebrated, and seldom 

71 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

is a proper occasion allowed to pass without a 
tertulia or "party." 

The ingenuousness of the lower classes and the 
simphcity and directness of the Mexicans of every 
rank knit their daily routine to custom and appro- 
priateness. Why should the milkman not drive his 
cow or his herd of goats to your door and deliver 
their product first-hand into your own pitcher? 
Why should not the Indian or peon passing your 
window in the morning sing improvised chants or 
folk songs as he goes to his work? Why should the 
vendor of hot rolls on the corner not cry aloud in 
his singsong voice the virtues of his wares and the 
important fact that his stock will soon be exhausted? 
Why should the seller of sweetmeats, as he dusts 
the flies away with a dirty wisp of paper, or as he 
unhygienically freshens his slices of coconut in the 
public fountain, not inform you that never did he 
have such toothsome delicacies? Why should the 
bootblack on the plaza not insist that you have 
your well-blacked shoes shined once more because 
it is Sunday? Since time immemorial he and his 
father and his ancestors before him have used the 
same formulas, and always the occasion or the 
product has justified his noisy if conventional en- 
thusiasm. Simplicity and fitness to purpose, — if we 
look deep enough we shall always find some ancient 
or present justification for every custom the world 
over. 

Custom, which marked the Mexican from before 
his birth, follows him to the grave. The elaborate- 
ness of the marriage and the baptismal ceremony 

72 



SIGNPOSTS OF CUSTOM 

are rivaled by the grandness of his funeral. This 
is almost the only occasion upon which every 
Mexican can be induced to hurry. Most Mexican 
cities require burial within twenty-four hours, for 
embalming is expensive and uncommon. Therefore 
the moment the eyes of the dead are closed, a near- 
by printshop is busy turning out immense black- 
bordered notices giving the hour of death, the ar- 
rangements for the funeral and the place of burial. 
These are in the post within a few hours and are 
often plastered up at the corners of the street. 
Burial is usually from a church or chapel, and in 
Mexico City and in most of the larger towns the 
trip to the cemetery is made by horse-car or trolley. 
The profuseness of Mexico's flowers and the skill 
of her workmen in fashioning out of green boughs 
and moss the most elaborate funeral designs make 
the black-draped trolley car which carries the body 
of a well-beloved citizen a bower of blossoms. 
Only men attend funerals in Mexico, and under 
Mexican law no clergyman may officiate out of 
doors, so there is acere mony not only in church 
but also in the mortuary chapel in the cemetery. 
Among the poorer classes coffins and even shrouds 
are rented, and even if the body is not to be dis- 
turbed, at least the silver handles are removed 
from all caskets before they are lowered into the 
ground. Graves can be rented for from one year to 
seven (at the end of which time the bones are taken 
out and thrown into a charnel house) or bought in 
perpetuity. 
The Mexican '^wake" among the lower classes 

73 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

is no less a ceremony than the actual burial, — 
although it is almost certain to lack its solemnity. 
Food and drink are always given, and where the 
latter prevails, the traditional Irish function has an 
enthusiastic rival in the Mexican. 

Thus the cycle of custom rolls around. Nothing 
interferes with a festival, as nothing interrupts the 
immemorial traditions of baptism, courtship and 
death. The Mexican's life, his business, his revolu- 
tions have a thousand individualities, and the back- 
ground before which he plays his roles may itself 
seem a moving kaleidoscope. But that background 
is custom and tradition, painted through long 
centuries, a background that repeats itself as it runs 
on an endless roll behind the stage upon which he 
acts out his days, a background whose unchanging 
sequence colors all his thought and feeling. 



74 



CHAPTER IV 

PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

ALL the world must play, every people in its 
■ own peculiar fashion. The play of Mexico is 
ever the play of children, its color the color of 
ancient folk dances, a round of traditional ceremony, 
and yet, one comes to feel, tragically lacking in that 
very spirit of play which vivifies the make-believe 
of childhood. 

Play in Mexico comes in for serious consideration, 
rather than joyful cooperation. With other peoples, 
recreation is an index; with the Mexican peon, at 
least, it is all the sweets of life. Call it what we 
will — a spiritual relaxation, a getting away from the 
troubles that oppress and the poverty that weakens, 
or a happy forgetting of the cruelty that enslaves — 
recreation holds a place in Mexican life such as is 
found among few modern nations. 

The need of those solemn festivals and stuffy 
recreations is the first and almost the only ''spirit- 
ual" requirement of the average Mexican, while 
the official celebrations of the many holidays is as 
important a part of the government function as 
the maintenance of a pohce force. Oppressed and 
undeveloped peoples all find expression in distinc- 
tive recreations, for, scientifically considered, amuse- 
ments represent "the instinctive and natural atti- 

75 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

tude of mind as divorced from occupational habits; 
they also represent unrealized ideals and national 
memories."^ 

The persistence of the tendency to festivity in 
Mexico is marked everywhere, — in the many holi- 
days, in the system of work and in religion; and 
almost the only remnants of Indian folk-culture are 
the dances and games which mark all native cere- 
monies. The Indian mind is so tenacious of tradi- 
tion that even after four hundred years many 
pagan rites have survived as virtually a part of 
Christian ritual. Even the celebration of Guada- 
lupe Day (December 12) at the famous shrine in 
a suburb of the capital is accompanied by dances of 
undoubted pagan origin and orgies which the 
Church can ignore but knows it is unwise to pro- 
hibit or seek to alter. 

Even during the present series of revolutions, 
with all the suffering and starvation, the Mexicans 
have lost no opportunity to amuse themselves. 
The characteristic fiestas are observed with un- 
abated enthusiasm, and if the tinsel is a little more 
tarnished and the sardine cans a little less numerous, 
the celebration of all the national and religious 
holidays has gone on unchecked. 

From the beginning of Mexican history these 
amusements have been recorded and described. 
Bernal Diaz, the chronicler of the Conquest, and 
Cortez himself, in his letters, described the wonder- 
ful sights which greeted their eyes on the weekly 

1 W. I. Thomas, "Race Psychology," American Journal of 
Sociology, May, 1912, page 758. 

76 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

market days in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. 
The Spaniards, themselves lovers of the festival, 
found it pleasant to graft their own customs upon 
those of the Indians. The conquerors built parks 
and recreation centers, bull rings, band stands, 
gambling halls, and most powerful of all, estabhshed 
drinking places upon a firm financial basis. The na- 
tive race responded to this phase of the enthusiasm 
of the Spaniard, and in this matter the mixed breed 
has never felt any confusion in his heritages. 

The attitude of the Mexican toward a holiday 
celebration, however, is to regard it in the nature 
of a spectacle, rather than as a function in which 
he himself takes part. This is particularly true 
when the amusements are of Spanish origin. The 
Indian stands silent and sodden before the band- 
stands, under fireworks and along the fines of march 
of the pageants of his rulers, and although the 
heavy state of intoxication which is part of his 
celebration must be taken into account, this does 
not explain, of itseK, why he is solemn rather than 
noisy during the great national festivals. Enjoy- 
ment there is, of course; the thousands of people 
of the lowest classes who turn out for every holiday 
indicate that, but their natural role of gloomy 
aloofness comes chiefly from the feeling that they 
have no part in the provisions which are made 
for their amusement. 

In the country, or where the Indian is himself 
the dispenser of the entertainment, we find an 
increasing proportion of the spectators either taking 

an active part or commenting freely and humor- 

77 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

ously upon the activities of the principals. For 
another thing, in the country the Hquor imbibed is 
very hkely to be of a more exhilarating character 
than in the capital, where pulque creates a ''con- 
vivial" spirit which is sullen and quiet. 

The hold of amusement on the Mexican mind 
was early recognized by the nation's leaders, and 
as in the old days of Rome, festivals were the 
ordinary form of bribing the simple populace. 
Under the Aztecs, there were royal feasts, consist- 
ing of "theatrical representations, gladiatorial 
combats, fights between wild beasts, athletic sports, 
musical performances, and poetical recitations in 
honor of kings, gods and heroes."^ 

In fact, the fiestas of the ancient Mexicans sound 
for all the world like a record of those to-day. 

Birthdays, victories, housewarmings, successful voyages or 
speculations were celebrated by feasts. . . . The feasting cus- 
tom was general from lowest to highest. It usually involved 
the distribution of gifts (dresses, gourds, cacao beans, flowers, 
etc.), often costly. There were also long and frequent religious 
celebrations. . . . They feasted on fish, dogs, fowls, tamales, 
bread, cacao. . . . They smoked tobacco, . - . Old people 
were allowed aU the octli they wanted and frequently became 
drunk. They were entertained by dancers, dwarfs, and jesters. 
. . . Dancing was the favorite amusement and was part of the 
religious rites. . . . Great public dances were participated in 
by thousands in the plaza or courtyard of the temple.^ 

The entertainment of the populace by great pub- 
lic fetes has come down through all Mexican history, 

1 H. H. Bancroft, "Native Races of the Pacific States of North 
America," Volume II, page 286, San Francisco, 1883. 
^Ibid., 283-288. 

78 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

and the period of Diaz, in the wisdom of his atti- 
tude toward the Indians, was one of the most 
lavish. All the national holidays were great occa- 
sions, decorations, parades, band concerts and fire- 
works marking each of them, year after year. The 
electrical illumination of the Zocalo, the main plaza 
of Mexico City, was as elaborate for each feast day 
as though it were a world's fair. The national and 
municipal palaces and the vast, towering bulk of 
the great cathedral were outlined in incandescent 
globes, while an immense Mexican flag, in green, 
white and red electric lights, flickered significantly 
over the vaulted dome of the ancient temple of 
religion. 

Under the rule of Spain, the number of Church 
festivals which were celebrated by general holidays 
so increased that one of the most radical provisions 
of the Reform Laws was that which reduced them 
to only six, — besides Sundays. Under Diaz, with 
the addition of new national holidays, the number 
again grew to uneconomic proportions, until in 1906 
the National Railways issued a special order recog- 
nizing, in its capacity of chief industry of the coun- 
try, but fourteen, besides Sundays, as follows: 

January 1 — New Year's Day 
February 5 — Signing of the Constitution 
March or April — Holy Thursday (a movable feast) 
March or April — Good Friday (a movable feast) 
May 5 — ^Victory of Puebla 
May or June — Corpus Christi (a movable" feast) 
June 24 — St. John (the Baptist) 
August 15 — ^Assumption Day 
September 15 — Birthday of the President 
79 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

September 16 — Independence Day 
November 1 — ^All Saints 
November 2 — ^AU Souls 
December 12 — Guadalupe Day 
December 25 — Christmas Day 

But the legal and Church festivals are far from 
completing the list which the Mexican peon, at 
least, wishes to observe. Humorists who include 
San Lunes, or St. Monday's day as a festival (owing 
to the weekly need of recuperating from the alco- 
holic celebration of Sunday) estimate that the 
Mexican works not more than two hundred days in 
the year. Counting all the Sundays and, as above, 
all the Mondays of the year, all the national holi- 
days, all the Church feast days, all the feast days 
formerly observed by the Church, the day of the 
patron saint of the hacienda where he works, the 
days of the patron saints of near-by churches and 
villages, the birthdays and also the saints' days of 
the owner of the hacienda, of his overseer, and of 
all the members of their families, the peon's own 
birthday and saint's day, ^hose of the members of 
his family and friends, it sometimes seems as if 
even two hundred were too generous an estimate 
of his working period. 

Since the new revolution some of the legal holi- 
days, notably the birthday of President Diaz, Sep- 
tember 15, are no longer celebrated as such, though 
the Mexican is very loath to give up an opportunity 
for a festival, no matter what the excuse. Under 
Diaz, for instance, April 2, the anniversary of a 
minor engagement at Puebla of which General Diaz 

80 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

was the personal hero, was celebrated largely as an 
honor to the dictator, but this celebration has now 
been substituted by the anniversaries of many 
battles notable in the revolutions of the past ten 
years. 

The religious hohdays, which are limited in the 
railway calendar to seven, actually numbered, under 
the Diaz period, seventy-nine, besides Sundays. 
Fifty-two were saints' days, fifteen solemn feast 
days, three Holy Days of Obhgation, and six formal 
festivals. 

The New Year is observed chiefly with its Euro- 
pean significance of the exchange of gifts and calls. 
Carnival Tuesday, preceding the beginning of Lent, 
is generally celebrated throughout Mexico, and in 
the capital it is the occasion for the Battle of Flow- 
ers, when carriages and automobiles passing each 
other slowly up and down the main streets and in 
the park of Chapultepec are loaded with cut flowers 
with which the occupants pelt one another joyously. 
At night, in the happy days when carriages might 
go abroad at night, the Battle of Flowers was con- 
tinued along Calle San Francisco (now Avenida de 
Francisco I. Madero), residents of the upper floors 
joining in the battle from their balconies. 

The celebration of Easter is marked by the first 
general appearance in the year of the booths or 
puestos fining the parks and market places. These 
booths are more typical of Mexico and of the Indian 
contribution than almost any integral part of the 
celebrations themselves, excepting, of course, the 
dances. Here, under spreading canvas, bunting or 

81 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

matting awnings, are displayed trinkets and toys 
made of native pottery and basketry, tissue paper 
and papier-mache. The Indians of outlying villages 
have spent months in making these trinkets and 
days in bringing them on foot to the cities and larger 
towns, packed in great crates upon their backs. All 
are accompanied by their entire families, with whom 
they set up housekeeping in the booths themselves, 
so that the gaudy display of wares takes place in 
an atmosphere of savory cooking and tumbUng 
Indian babies. Each of the half-dozen festival 
periods when the booths are erected has its distinc- 
tive toys and trinkets. The Easter puestos are filled 
not only with religious images, but also with gaudy 
and terrible-visaged dolls representing Judas, the 
betrayer. These images, usually of papier-mache, 
are supposed to be hung and destroyed at noon on 
Holy Saturday when the Passion ends. 

At nightfall on Holy Thursday the church bells 
become silent, the devout Mexicans put on com- 
plete mourning, and the streets become silent. No 
church bells ring until noon on Saturday, at which 
time in the capital the great bell of the Cathedral 
booms out and starts the pandemonium which is 
carried from church to church as the bells break out 
in violent and most unmusical noise. At this mo- 
ment the Judases are strung up, many from the 
balconies of business buildings and along the main 
streets, firecrackers and explosives within the larger 
ones burst them into pieces, and the crackling and 
explosion of the images adds to the clamor of the 
bells. In their explosion the Judases scatter abroad 

82 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

sweetmeats and cakes, bread and pennies, for which 
the populace scrambles with glee, an appreciation 
not alone of the symbolic revenge upon the be- 
trayer. The celebration of Holy Week is not always 
confined to the destruction of Judases and the 
ceremonies of the Church. Certain villages have 
traditional celebrations of the Passion, in which a 
play, including even the crucifixion itself, is given 
by local devotees. In fact, there have been occa- 
sions when these local Passion Plays have gone so 
far as actual crucifixion, the result of a religious 
fanaticism which appears from time to time in vari- 
ous sections of Mexico as well as in other countries. 
Aside from the fanatical phases, however, these 
local Passion Plays are usually extremely ludicrous 
and yet illuminating in their demonstration of the 
Indian conception of the Christian story. 

Corpus Christi, which falls in May or June, is 
usually a Church festival of great pomp, but as 
there are now no religious street processions in 
Mexico, the spectacular features are not so evident 
as they were in older days. 

A typical Mexican festival is the celebration of 
the day of St. Peter and St. Paul in June, when the 
devil is supposed to roam abroad. This is very 
largely a children's festival, and little papier-mache 
or pottery devils are distributed, together with toy 
swords and pistols with which the children promptly 
annihilate the images of their arch enemy. 

The feast of St. John the Baptist, on June 24, is 
noted as the one day upon which all Mexicans take 
a bath. It may well be that the Indian and peon 

83 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

of the plateau do not bathe throughout the year, 
but this reUgious festival is observed not only in 
spirit but in the letter, with a scrubbing more or 
less effective, although the locale of the ceremonial 
is not at a religious shrine, and the rivers and the 
public bathhouses are crowded from dawn until 
midnight. 

The celebration of the 16th of September, the 
anniversary of the cry of Dolores when the priest 
Hidalgo roused the Indians against the Spaniards 
in 1810, is the great national festival, the second in 
importance being May 5, the anniversary of the 
victory over the French at Puebla. Both are always 
celebrated by military parades, band concerts and 
fireworks. 

The double festival of All Saints' and All Souls' 
Days, November 1 and 2, is one of the occasions 
when the booths again appear along the edges of 
the markets and parks, and when trinkets typical 
of the season are sold. Skeletons, grimly humorous 
coffins, toys and specially made cakes and sweet- 
meats are for sale. Theoretically the Mexican uses 
the latter to decorate the graves of his dead. Thou- 
sands make a pilgrimage, on November 1, to the 
cemeteries,where they follow an ancient custom of 
placing food and drink and gifts upon the graves 
so that the spirits who are to return to earth upon 
the morrow may have human comforts on their 
journey. 

December 12, the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, 
is celebrated throughout Mexico, and also on the 
twelfth of each month special pilgrimages from dis- 

84 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

tant States come to the capital to visit the shrine. 
The celebration of this festival at the suburb of 
Guadalupe is marked with innumerable picturesque 
and significant features. Hundreds of the worship- 
ers who are camped about in the streets of the village 
and in the fields surrounding it climb to the summit 
of the hill upon their knees. Other hundreds drink 
the waters of the miraculous spring which still flows 
from the side of the sacred hill, and the trade in 
empty beer bottles in which to transport the holy 
water home is brisk and lucrative. 

The Guadalupe church and its many chapels are 
crowded from morning until late at night, and serv- 
ices are continuous, not only on the Holy Day itself, 
but before and after it. The draperies and banners 
of the interior of the church are spangled with new 
silver and gold offerings, medals or representations 
of various portions of the anatomy, arms and legs 
and heads, as votive offerings accompanied by 
prayers for recovery from disease. Many miracu- 
lous cures are reported during each of the annual 
celebrations and a great pile of crutches and canes 
in a sacristy room is tangible proof thereof. 

Outside, the streets are lined with booths where 
food, medals and pictures are sold. On Guadalupe 
Day in particular tiny reproductions of the Virgin 
surrounded by diminutive glistening mirrors are 
disposed of by the booth holders. It is amusing — or 
shocking — to some to find these mirror-encased 
pictures of the Virgin forming the headdresses of 
the dancers in the pagan rites which are carried on 
in the very shadow of the church to the music of 

85 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

drum and fife suggestive of the savage dances of all 
primitive peoples. 

The Christmas celebrations follow hard on 
Guadalupe Day, for Christmas in Mexico is cele- 
brated for nine days, with the culmination on 
Christmas Eve. The booths are filled with images 
of the Christ Child, of the Holy Family and the 
Magi. In addition the entire fund of imagination 
and tradition of the Indian is called upon for the 
production of toys and whistles, dolls, bonbons and 
everything which can give joy to a Mexican child. 
These trinkets are bought by the dozen and with 
sweetmeats and bits of sugar cane go to fill the tall 
earthen pots decorated with papier-mache and tissue 
paper which are called pinatas. The pinatas are the 
Mexican Christmas trees and besides the cheap 
gifts which are to be bought at the puestos, are 
often stuffed with valuable presents and money. 
The pinatas are strung up at the Christmas parties, 
and in succession each child, blindfolded, is given a 
club and has a chance to break the earthen jug, 
upon which consxmamation the entire company joins 
in a joyous scramble for the presents. Theoret- 
ically the pinata is broken only on Christmas Eve, 
but throughout the entire nine days of the Christ- 
mas celebration pinata parties are held by all classes. 

The nine-day celebration is usually carried out 
by nine families, the entire company gathering on 
succeeding evenings in different houses. A proces- 
sion with a brief ceremony is the solemn part of the 
festivity, the nine-day celebration being in memory 
of the nine days' journey of Joseph and Mary to 

86 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

Bethlehem. Each night the Holy Family, repre- 
sented by images carried by guests, asks in rhyme 
for shelter, and each night it is refused, until Christ- 
mas Eve, when, with an image of the Christ Child, 
they finally find their only refuge in a stable, fitted 
up more or less elaborately and with more or less 
beautiful figures. Each evening ends in a dance and 
supper, the most elaborate being that of Christmas 
Eve, or the Noche Buena (Blessed Night), when the 
entire nine famihes are guests at the house of the 
family which can entertain them best. 

In the celebration of the religious holidays in 
Mexico, one can invariably trace the pagan survi- 
vals, while in the celebration of the national holi- 
days one finds relics of Aztec and Spanish royal 
festivals. In essence the Mexican feast days, how- 
ever, are very much alike, whether they be the 
celebration of Guadalupe Day, of the Mexican In- 
dependence, or of a local holy day before a village 
shrine. Always there are the little booths where the 
Indians of outlying villages come to sell their trin- 
kets, their sweetmeats, their potteries and their 
baskets to the holiday makers. Always there is 
music and always there are dances. The strange 
conglomeration of European and Indian ideas may 
be of interest to the archaeologist, but the Indian and 
the peon and the Mexican small boy and little girl 
find in them all the thrilling enjoyment which be- 
longs only to childhood, either of race or of years. 

There are innumerable local festivals and special 
celebrations of a religious nature which can be 
traced back to Indian custom and usually to certain 

87 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

traditions of the Church itself. The instance which 
comes to mind is the blessing of the animals on the 
day of St. Anthony the Abbot, when in the door- 
way of the church dedicated to this saint burros, 
cows, sheep and pigs, parrots and cats are brought 
to receive a sprinkling of holy water and a brief 
benediction from the priest. That this custom is an 
inheritance by the good St. Anthony from some 
Aztec god seems beyond question, and priests new- 
come from Spain or Italy are frank in their shocked 
surprise over the Hteralness of many of the cele- 
brations in which they are called upon to take part. 

The attitude of the Mexican toward the fiesta 
has not, however, been exaggerated by most of 
those who have recorded such incidents as this. 
The fact that a miniature strike can be created in 
almost any industry by telling the peons that a 
festival is being celebrated in a near-by town, is 
humorous enough, but is unfortunately literally 
true. The slightest excuse is sufficient for a festival, 
and the excuse is sought as often as the American 
small boy seeks an excuse to go to a ball game, or to 
play hookey from school. No employer can safely 
refuse permission to his peons to celebrate his own 
birthday, nor indeed that of his wife or his daughter, 
nor that of his son, nor the baptism of his baby, so 
that the number of festivals celebrated in any 
Mexican community is in direct ratio to the infor- 
mation and inventiveness of the inhabitants. 

The personal feast day, whether that of an em- 
ployer whose peons erect a shaky arch of flowers 
before his doorway and disturb his slumbers with 

88 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

dolorous music, or that of a child, a parent or com- 
padre, takes on the nature of a true fiesta. Usually 
it is the saint's day or onomdstico that is celebrated, 
with a party, with gifts both to and from the hon- 
ored individual, and with the formal fehcitations 
of his friends. The birthday, although not always 
celebrated with a feast, is remembered with cards 
and congratulations and is referred to glowingly as 
the cumpleanos (Uterally the "achievement of 
years") or as one's "day of days." 

The Mexican's amusements and recreations take 
myriad forms other than the formal fiesta and its 
accompaniments. Bullfights, cockfights, gambhng 
and intoxication are balanced against music of 
every sort, social dancing, the theater and athletics. 
The cruelty of the amusements typical to Mexico 
has been the subject of many diatribes. The bull- 
fight and the cockfight are undoubtedly an expres- 
sion of a certain savagery not confined merely to 
the Indian, but coming from both his Spanish and 
his indigenous strains. In the great days of the 
bullfights, the immense arena of Mexico City, where 
fifteen thousand spectators could be seated, was 
the scene of magnificent gatherings of society as 
well as of the common people of the land. The 
goring of the horses, perhaps the most disagreeable 
portion of the battle, was looked upon with equan- 
imity, although the only applause which the riders 
received was when they skilfully avoided allowing 
their poor mounts to be caught on the horns of the 
bull. With a particularly powerful bull, however, 
it was considered necessary, in order to tire the bull, 

89 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

to allow him to kill several horses. The handling 
of the bull itseK was a matter of skill and daring, 
and there was Little bloodshed except by the one 
skilful stroke between the shoulder blades by an 
able matador. In the country, on the other hand, 
and in the hands of amateurs, the bullfights are 
very likely to reach a most disgusting depth of 
butchery, and the enjoyment is confined almost 
alone to the pleasure of seeing blood flow. 

Another feature of the bullfighting which is too 
often overlooked by the moralists who have in- 
veighed against it is the matter of the mere baiting 
of the bull. The cruelty inflicted upon the animal 
by his rage is seldom spoken of, and even to-day the 
Mexican festivals on the farms where a young bull 
is chased and beaten from the walls of an impro- 
vised arena, tired out, kicked and finally thrown, 
and ultimately ridden by daring cowboys, is a 
phase of cruelty to the animal which is in some 
ways more degrading to the spectators than wit- 
nessing a skilful bullfight by trained masters. 

Cockfighting is a thoroughly gladiatorial combat, 
the occasion for heavy betting and almost inevitable 
death to at least one of the contestants. The 
birds, bred and trained for the battle, fight with 
gaffs of razorlike sharpness from three to four inches 
long, and the conqueror of a spirited fight is often 
as near dead as his antagonist. Aside from its 
cruelty to the animal, cock-fighting is significant 
chiefly as an outlet for the gambling instinct, for 
it is always the occasion for bets and wagers some- 
times running into large figures. 

90 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

Gambling is, indeed, one of the true '^ recrea- 
tions" of the Mexican people; its various forms, 
Aztec and Spanish, tempt Creole, mestizo and 
Indian alike, although (perhaps because they have 
more spare change) it is considered a vice of white 
and mestizo particularly. In this connection one 
cannot omit listing the recreational features of 
drinking, smoking and sex, all of which rank as 
amusements as well as among the true national 
vices. Few Mexicans of the lower classes consider 
them as anything but recreation, and none of any 
class would consider their omission from that 
category justified. 

Of the milder forms of personal amusement and 
recreation the most thoroughly Mexican is perhaps 
the promenade. Since colonial times, at least, all 
Mexicans have found much pleasure and satisfac- 
tion in walks and rides abroad. Under the viceroys 
the upper classes rode forth, the men on horseback 
(often in native costume), the ladies in generous 
victorias drawn by beautiful horses. In the palmy 
days of Diaz this custom had grown to an institu- 
tion, and each afternoon, and on Sunday mornings 
as well, the most beautiful equipages bearing the 
most beautiful women of the capital drove slowly 
up and down San Francisco Street between rows 
of gaping bystanders, and after an hour (at sunset in 
the afternoon) drove briskly away and out the 
beautiful Paseo de la Reforma to the park and 
restaurant of Chapultepec, a miniature and beau- 
tiful Bois de Boulogne. 

On Sunday mornings the more conventional of 

91 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the older families and hosts of the middle and lower 
classes had their promenade on foot, the center 
being, in the capital, the beautiful Alameda, where 
the finest bands of the country played to great 
throngs who walked or sat in the shaded parks. 
These customs find their replica, in minor, in all 
the cities and towns of the republic. 

The social intercourse of Mexican families of 
the middle and upper classes is very likely to be a 
tremendous affair, following as it does the heavy 
round of tradition. Calls are exchanged by the 
ladies, but the men and the children are invariably 
included in the evening parties, or tertulias. These 
are magnificent occasions whenever they are ar- 
ranged, and the intercourse of families is almost 
entirely confined to this form of amusement which 
even the Mexicans find extremely ''stuffy." The 
women become acquainted through long and formal 
calls (one hour being the proper length), and if 
their husbands meet also outside the formal parties, 
the natural development is a dia del campo, or 
''day in the country", the one informal affair in 
the Mexican social calendar. 

With the upper classes this is a visit to the 
hacienda of one, with a great country meal in its 
cool halls or else a barbecue of a kid in the open air. 
The dia del campo is not, however, confined to the 
upper class, but is distinctly and elaborately ob- 
served by every grade of Mexican society. Sunday 
is the great festival day, beginning with a trip, if 
possible, even if it be no more than a voyage in a 
scow hired from an Indian market gardener, its 

92 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

climax an elaborate meal served under the trees 
or bought at an outdoor restaurant. The dia del 
campo is sure to end in a dance, a form of amuse- 
ment — an exercise be it said — to which the Mexican 
is exceedingly partial. 

Aside from the careful and not to say elaborate 
chaperonage which surrounds the Mexican social 
fimction, dancing is extremely popular, for it gives 
definite opportunity for intercourse between the 
yoimg members of the two sexes, especially when 
connected with a dia del campo. Wherever two 
or three f amihes are gathered, then, the dance may 
be very informal, usually to the music of two or 
three Indian bandsmen upon whatever instruments 
they may have at hand. 

The theater has long been well regarded in 
Mexico, occupying relatively an even higher place 
in the life of the people than the theater in the 
United States or England. Yet the number of 
troupes travehng over the country has always been 
smaU, and in the days before motion pictures, many 
of the most important cities of the country had good 
drama only for very brief seasons each year. Notwith- 
standing this fact, almost every city of prominence 
had built itself a magnificent theater, the energy 
which in the colonial times went to the construc- 
tion of churches being devoted in the time of Diaz 
to the erection of theaters. There have been very 
good actors in Mexico City, but the drama has 
never taken the form that it has in other countries 
where long seasons of a single play are the reward 
of a successful production. 

93 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

The Mexican theatrical organization is inevitably 
a stock company, and each season the seats are 
subscribed for in much the same way as opera seats 
are taken elsewhere, so that in order to satisfy the 
exactions of an audience which comes regularly 
the producers have to change their plays so often 
that the best of Mexican companies, even in the 
capital, repeat over and over certain of the Spanish 
classics, and seldom, except on special occasions, 
give a native play or a new and untried European 
success. This continuous change, combined with 
generally poor stage direction, is responsible for the 
chief bane of the Mexican theater, the prompter. 
Hidden or partially hidden behind his hood in the 
middle of the stage, he can be heard over almost all 
the theater giving the lines before they are voiced 
by the player and successfully destroying all the 
illusions of the stage. 

During the days of Diaz there was each year 
at least one season of excellent opera, usually given 
by an Italian company which had traveled in South 
America or in the West Indies, the government 
paying a handsome subsidy for these performances. 
Under Carranza a similar effort was made, but 
without approaching the general high level of the 
seasons previous to 1911. 

The most popular of Mexican theatrical amuse- 
ments, however, are the zarzuelas, or Spanish one- 
act farces. Spanish as well as native actors and 
dancers appear at the various theaters where the 
zarzuela holds sway. The type of performance given 
is comparable to nothing which is known in the 

94 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

United States or England, with the possible excep- 
tion of a similarity in some ways to the playlets 
which are parts of the vaudeville or variety show. 
Each of the four acts or tandas of a zarzuela per- 
formance is a separate play in which, however, 
practically the entire caste takes part. Tickets are 
sold separately for each, so that one may either buy 
a seat for the entire evening or may buy a tanda and 
enjoy the show for half an hour. Such road com- 
panies as exist in Mexico give zarzuelas, but include 
also in their reportory dramas and farces filling a 
whole evening. 

Motion-picture theaters have now sprung up all 
over the country and have, as in other lands, 
brought entertainment to those who formerly lived 
lives of almost complete provincial seclusion. The 
French and Italian films are the most popular, al- 
though the American companies, especially during 
the war, fitted up prints of their productions with 
Spanish titles for Mexican and other Latin- 
American consumption. European motion-picture 
dramas, however, are preferred, although the Amer- 
ican comedians of the slap-stick variety and the serial 
'Hhrillers" are perhaps the most profitable films 
exhibited in Mexico. It is interesting that the serial 
films which are produced for a weekly feature of 
about two reels over several months in American 
motion-picture houses are shown in Mexico com- 
plete in one sitting, so that forty reels will be run 
off in two sessions of a single day, one admission 
price being charged, an intermission of an hour 

95 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

being given for the audience to go home to dinner 
between 7 and 8 o'clock. 

Aside from the theaters and such receptions and 
balls as occur from time to time, there is compara- 
tively little night life in Mexico. In happier times 
there were cafes of the European type which were 
much frequented, but one by one they died out for 
want of patronage, some of the most famous and 
historical having passed during the Diaz regime. 
The restaurants which are almost the sole successors 
to the old cafes were often characterful and popular 
in the capital, but in the provinces, even including 
such large cities as Monterey and Guadalajara, 
restaurant and cafe life is almost entirely absent. 
Even in Mexico City restaurants do not keep late 
hours, there have never been any cabarets, and 
there is seldom any entertainment save the music 
of the orchestra with an occasional singer. Closing 
laws were enforced under Diaz with considerable 
rigidity, saloons closing at 10 p.m. and restaurants 
at 1 A.M., and the uncertain poHce conditions since 
the revolution have made the people's caution their 
own curfew. 

The Mexican clubs, or ''casinos", differ little from 
similar organizations elsewhere, but they do defi- 
nitely take the place of the cafe life of European 
cities and towns. They are usually limited to men 
of the upper classes, and are far more social than 
sociable, although the great clubs of the capital 
were, in the time of Diaz, elaborate, and popular 
with their members. 

Athletics, as a form of recreation, are almost 

96 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

solely of foreign origin, and have come but slowly 
to Mexico. The Mexican does not take kindly to, 
nor does he usually play well, games which involve 
contest. He is a bad loser and to this psychological 
trait can probably be traced the fact that he is very 
likely to cheat. To him, the contest is one of his 
brains against the others' and, as we have seen, his 
' sense of honor is largely concerned with maintaining 
his prestige rather than retaining the respect of 
his fellows. 

American and English games are rather too 
strenuous, also, for the Mexican cHmate. Baseball, 
however, had a growing popularity, when there were 
many Americans in the capital, and some of the 
best players on the local amateur teams were 
Mexican boys of the upper class. The game was 
taken up, also, by Mexican teams, and, despite the 
departure of foreigners, there were, in 1921, six 
baseball leagues in the Repubhc. About thirty 
teams belonged, and practically all the players were 
Mexicans. A magnificent beginning has thus been 
made in the training of Mexican boys both in team- 
work and in athletic development. The English 
games of cricket and association football have long 
been played in Mexico by the British, and football 
at least has received some attention and Mexican 
teams have been organized during the annual sea- 
son. Polo was played by the upper-class Mexicans 
as well as by the English and Americans and some 
good native players were developed, although the 
best were always men who learned the game abroad. 

Bowling has grown somewhat in favor in Mexico 

97 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

among the Mexicans and perhaps a dozen bowUng 
alleys exist in the capital, but as a whole the game's 
cousins, biUiards and pool, appeal more to the in- 
tellectual attitude of the Mexicans. Horseback 
riding has always been popular in Mexico, and 
Mexicans are famous riders in almost every class. 
Golf and tennis have attracted hardly a handful of 
Mexicans in the twenty years that both have been 
known there. 

The Young Men's Christian Association has had 
an interesting influence in Mexico. Introduced 
first through the Mexican Central Railway for its 
American employees, the organization later estab- 
lished native branches and trained native secretaries 
and athletic instructors. The work spread rapidly 
over the country, and although some of the branches 
were closed under Carranza, their popularity was 
such that they were revived when times began to 
improve. There were large classes in the gymna- 
siums, and a real start was made in track athletics. 
BasebaU was especially encouraged, and basket 
ball and boxing, as well as track work, also gained 
headway. Basket ball has even been played by 
girls in some of the private schools of the capital. 

The Y. M. C. A. and the foreigners have been 
the chief influence in athletic development in 
Mexico, but^ as far back as 1900 physical exercises 
were ordered in the government schools. These 
were supposed to be of a hygienic rather than 
athletic character and consisted of gymnastic work 
and fencing. This was expanded in some of the 
higher institutions, notably the National Military 

98 



PLAYTIME IN MEXICO 

Academy, to weight-lifting, drilling with heavy 
bars, dumb-bells, etc. A craze for fencing came in 
after the Madero revolution and Italian masters 
were brought over to instruct the students in the 
higher public schools. 

There are, moreover, certain native forces tend- 
ing to build up the athletic life of Mexico. Among 
some of the Indians wresthng is a popular sport, 
and the interest in athletic exhibitions, where the 
Mexican formerly looked on, has often led to his 
regarding them as possible opportunities for his 
own playing. One of these games is pelota, as it is 
called in Mexico {Jai-alai elsewhere), the Basque 
sport of playing a ball against three walls and the 
pavement with terrific force, throwing and catching 
it in a basket attached to the arm. It is com- 
parable only to lacrosse, which its athletic features 
somewhat resemble. Mexicans at one time found 
this sport interesting, not only as a gambling 
opportunity, but also as something that they 
themselves could learn and play. It is, however, 
an extremely violent game and no one can safely 
play it who is not in the pink of condition. The 
same may be said of bull-fighting which at one time 
was a popular amateur sport with those who could 
afford it. 

As a people, however, the Mexicans are not 

athletic and probably never will be, for the climate 

is decidedly against all violent exercise and exacts 

an undue toll even from normal exertion. Only 

on its psychological side can athletics be considered 

of vital importance, — in the development of team- 

99 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

work and sportsmanship and in the encouragement 
of participation instead of observation merely. It 
seems that these features are being developed by 
baseball, which there, as elsewhere, has stimulated 
the sense of play and is certainly as near a ''na- 
tional sport" as Mexico has so far attained. 

Again, however, the amusements of this people 
must be noted at their face value, for what they 
actually are and not for what they may attain or 
what a few individuals have achieved. By this 
standard Mexico's recreations are but reflexes of 
her past and of her desires for the present, simple, 
childlike, seeking pleasure and fun first, and quite 
without any understanding of the more compli- 
cated Anglo-Saxon conception that play is some- 
thing that is ''good for you." 



100 



CHAPTER V 

MEXICAN CULTURE 



THE standards of Mexican culture are Spanish, 
but Spain's domination of its outward mani- 
festations does not penetrate so deeply as appears 
at first blush. The tools with which Mexican art 
has been created are almost uniformly Indian. 
The architecture and indeed the graphic arts 
trace back to the Conc[uerors, but the handicraft, 
in all its glory and beauty of detail, is that of 
Indian workmen. Literature, education, religion 
are Spanish, chiefly, but again the product has been 
shaped by Indian thought, Indian living, Indian 
apathy. The relationship extends through all 
Mexican life, but nowhere is the deep, sullen, yet 
often beautiful and lovable Indian strain more 
obvious than on the cultural plane. 

This is important in our understanding of Mexi- 
can mentality, and its divergences carry us back 
directly to the difference in race and in the stages 
of cultural civilization. The Aztecs hved in an era 
of human sacrifices, of cannibalism, and of rulers 
to whose despotic cruelties they had been accus- 
tomed to submit themselves for unchanging ages. 
Their government was a theocracy, their culture 
expressed in picture-writing, in astrology and in 

101 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

folk- tales and mythology which place them in actu- 
ality on a parallel with European tribes of three 
thousand rather than one thousand years before the 
Conquest. Only in the arts of building and of 
luxury did their empire rank up in the scale. 

The Spaniards brought with them to Mexico the 
highest culture of the Europe of their day. Ener- 
getic, progressive indeed, intensely religious, 
haughty and proud of their race and civilization, 
they met and conquered a people who were without 
firearms or military science, with relatively little 
cultural cohesion, a people servile, obedient and 
indolent, ruled and led to war only by despotic and 
predatory chieftains. 

The triumph of the white man's culture was so 
absolute in outward seeming and the collapse of the 
Indian civilization so complete that it apparently 
brought all the Indians under the direct and imme- 
diate sway of Spain and the Church. For three 
hundred years only one culture prevailed in Mexico, 
and if it seems to-day as if Spain's greatest effect 
was the destruction of the intellectual as well as the 
material bases of Indian progress, we must realize 
that, after all, the very fact of the Aztecs' aston- 
ishing collapse is indicative, at least, of their in- 
ability to meet their crises. 

Spain, however we may regard the causes, cer- 
tainly dominated the culture of Mexico from the 
very moment of her triumph. A generation of 
Indian poets and artists, and the last trace of 
genius in the native race was gone. The language, 
the standards, the religion of Castile became Mex- 

102 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

ican, but with all their many faults, these three did 
indeed furnish a stout harness for the turning of 
Indian power to the creation of the Mexico that we 
know. With Spain as the intellectual as well as 
the political master, the Indians became slaves 
even more completely culturally than they were 
physically. 

This era continued down to the Independence, 
when a new element came to destroy one period of 
progress without creating a new. After the success 
of the revolution had been achieved by the Creoles 
through the methods of the white man, the Creoles 
were in turn driven out by the mestizos. In this 
political upheaval we find the first appearance of 
the mestizo culture, using culture in the definitive 
sense. This has manifested itself in the same intel- 
lectual hybridism, emotional chaos and rabid indi- 
vidualism that distinguishes the mestizo touch in 
all Mexico. Claiming a white heritage and main- 
taining a hazy contact with European thought, the 
mestizo discarded the paternal understanding of the 
Spaniard, destroyed such vestiges as remained of 
Indian cultural adaptation and began the masquer- 
ading of his ideals of personalism and destruction in 
an over-emphasis of his peculiar conception of the 
white man's progress. Throwing away what under- 
standing of the Indian the Spanish regime had left 
to him, he began borrowing from Frenchman and 
German, from Englishman and American, this and 
that and the other idea of intellectual and political 
virtue. These he has adapted wholesale to Mexican 
problems with colossal misunderstanding both of 

103 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the culture which he borrowed and of the soil in 
which he has planted it. The mestizo "culture" is 
based upon the preconceived idea that Mexico must 
fit the mestizo's pecuhar picture of a European 
community, whether she wishes it or not. A deca- 
dent Spanish feudalism, a hybrid French philosophy, 
an Indianized German socialism and a deep-tanned 
English empire building, — these the mestizo has 
combined with a crass imitation of American polit- 
ical organization and American industriaUsm to 
create the astonishing cultural mixture which has 
been the bane of his national and intellectual 
history. 

The cultural problem of Mexico has indeed al- 
ways been marked by the failure of the protagonists 
of the higher culture to seek any contact, save that 
of the opportunist, with the lower. Seldom, even 
at its wisest, did the Spanish rule of Mexico reach 
down to understand the Indian and by the Indian's 
own standards and virtues to raise him to a plane 
where he might meet the conditions of the modern 
world on anything like equal terms. Rather such 
success as the Spaniards had was due to elements 
within their own culture which made possible the 
needed adaptation to bend Indian power to the 
realization of their own ideals, and more than all 
else, the inherent if poorly expressed willingness of 
the white to help his darker brother to rise, — the 
one trait above all others which the half-breed does 
not inherit from his fair-skinned ancestor. 

The Spaniards destroyed the arts of the Aztecs 
by the very process which to-day is the most potent 

104 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

of all forces in Mexico, — substitution. How well 
developed that art was we cannot truly estimate, 
for practically all that is left of it are the stone 
ruins and idols, some thirty illuminated parchment 
scrolls or codices, a few examples of beautiful 
feather work, a very little carved jewelry, some 
crude pottery and some examples of fine weaving. 
Even the civilization of Gnossos has left more 
tangible proof of its rank, and in reality we have 
little more than the glowing tales of the conquerors 
(whose enthusiasms are exceeded only by the 
redoubtable Baron Munchausen) as evidence of 
the rejflnement and magnificence of the Aztec court. 
There is no desire or need of belittling the won- 
derful architectural works of these interesting 
aborigines, or any possibility of discounting the 
greatness of their artistic achievements. But if, 
as we must, we judge the Indians of the pre- 
Hispanic era by the Indians of to-day, we are forced 
to the realization that then, as now, they were 
skiKul imitators, beautiful craftsmen under direc- 
tion, but as a people lacking in originality and true 
creative sense. Their aristocracies, succeeding each 
other, passing from hand to hand the torch of their 
knowledge, seem to have been the only true 
creators. Cortez's chroniclers say that the wonder- 
ful feather work, which was perhaps the highest 
artistic achievement after sculpture of the Mexican 
Indians, was a craft of the upper classes, who 
followed it as the court ladies of medieval Europe 
followed tapestry making. The architecture of this 

era, highly developed within decided limitations, 

105 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

was apparently more massive than elegant, lacked 
constructive skill (even the arch was unknown), 
and was rigidly conventional. The sculpture, in 
finish close to perfection, was stiff and unimagina- 
tive, lacking in pictorial concept and usually in 
artistic proportion. The paintings which survive 
in the codices (which the Indians told Cortez were, 
their most esteemed works of art) are crude, 
extremely conventional, without perspective and 
with little color appreciation. Of the jewelry 
work in gold and silver, we have practically nothing 
but the word of the conquerors, who were, as usual, 
most enthusiastic; the manufacture of the precious 
metals into jewels was early prohibited by the 
Crown, such wealth going direct to Spain in the 
form of bullion, and the much praised works of 
metallic art were themselves melted down when- 
ever discovered. 

All this is so at variance with the common con- 
ception that its statement seems crude and unap- 
preciative. But it is rather taking the sensible 
viewpoint that the wonderful works of the Aztecs 
and their predecessors were noteworthy manifesta- 
tions of a very high degree of barbaric culture, 
perhaps the most interesting and awe-inspiring 
relics on the Western Hemisphere. But by the 
self-imposed standards of those who praise them, 
they fail miserably to sustain the contention that 
the Aztecs had reached a high degree of true 
civilization. Wonderful but latent possibilities 
existed there, and no question can be raised (except 
climatically and racially) that this barbaric culture 

106 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

might have developed, if left alone, into something 
worthy indeed of all that has been said in its praise. 

Its greatest value, however, seems to be that 
which the Spaniards harnessed, the adaptive and 
understanding skill of the native artisan under 
intelligent direction. The Mexican Indian was — 
and is — a fine craftsman, and the Spaniards used 
this skiU with not a little wisdom, in the creation 
of the most wonderful colonial architecture in the 
New World. The pity of it has been, then, not 
the imposition of European artistic standards, but 
the failure to develop Indian imitative ability and 
handicraft within those standards to an originality, 
a cultural force, which might long since have placed 
them firmly on their own feet. We do not indeed 
know that this could have been done, but the 
record of human and group crisis shows that when 
the crisis fails to develop adaptability, it tends to 
destroy the best in the old and to accept the worst 
in the new. 

To-day, in studying the culture of Mexico, we 
face the facts alone, and those tell us that virtually 
every art, native and foreign, bears the mark of 
Spain. But Spanish art has had, since the days 
of the Moors, a peculiar trait unknown to any 
other artistic concept of Europe, — the trait of 
close identification with the soil of the land where 
it flourishes. Previous to the Renaissance, the 
art of Europe had definite roots in the soil. Egyp- 
tian, Greek and early Roman buildings and statues 
belong to the spots where they were made, maintain 

the contours of their landscapes, the colors of their 

107 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

rocks and trees and flowers. With the Renaissance, 
seeking more the idea than the appropriate form, 
painting and architecture were cast in a new mold 
and sHpped far away from. the beauty of native 
colors and native outlines; this Renaissance spirit 
dominates Europe and America to-day and still 
stifles the expression, in form and material, of the 
individual place where it is created. 

In Spain, on the other hand, there has, since the 
Moors, been an artistic identification with Spain 
itself. Moorish artisans, making annual pilgrimages 
to Mecca, there met and talked with Persian artists 
and received from them the basic conception of the 
unity of art with life and physical environment 
which made the artistic contributions to Spain of 
the Moors and of the Spaniards who followed the 
Moors so deep and beautiful a part of the identity 
of the land itself.^ 

All who have thrilled at the harmonized beauty 
of the Alhambra, and all who have gasped at the 
first sight of the cathedral of Toledo, towering above 
its hills like a pinnacle of its own rocky foundation, 
will realize, in recollection, their contrast with the 
jeweled but almost incongruous beauty of the 
Gothic cathedrals set on the flat plains in Northern 
France. 

It was this spirit that dominated the artistic con- 
tribution of Spain in Mexico. The completeness of 
the harmonies of the great churches, towering as 
they do above the hovels of Mexican villages, their 

1 Cf. Wallace Thompson, "The Art of the Spaniard Anglada," 
Fine Arts Journal, Chicago, May, 1913. 

108 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

tiled and colored domes glistening as though 
dreamed of only to catch and resolve like prisms the 
Mexican sunhght, the carved fagades seemingly de- 
signed but to give glory to Mexican moonUght, sift 
into the heart of every observer. Instinctive it all 
must have been, and yet the perfection of the blend- 
ing of Spanish architectural genius and Indian 
artisanship seems as if some colossal mind had 
planned, from the beginning of time, to use and 
unite these two forces. Indeed, not the least of the 
facts which crystallize to our appreciation of these 
mighty harmonies is the shock of the havoc which 
was wrought almost immediately after the Inde- 
pendence when a succession of Mexican architects 
and artists stripped so much of the beauty from 
the interiors and even the exteriors of Mexican 
churches to replace them with the ghastly "clas- 
sical" Roman columns and whitewashed walls 
which are as foreign to Mexico as would be the 
ivied brick churches of rural England. 

Not that the Spanish architecture of Mexico did 
not undergo many tribulations, but as we look on 
the innumerable treasures which the viceroys left 
as the greatest beauty of Mexico, always that 
harmony persists, always is there the identification 
with Mexico as she truly is, always the churches and 
the palaces belong to the spot where they stand, — • 
belong with a completeness which age may have 
made more perfect, but which age did not create. 
The story of Mexican architecture cannot be told 
here, for it belongs solely to the historic past, but 
no one who would tell truth of Mexico and of her 

109 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

culture can omit appreciation of these sublime 
monuments, monuments alike to beauty, to re- 
ligion and to the true adaptation of Spain to the 
reahty that she was able to find in Mexico.^ 

Of the native arts which are to-day entirely In- 
dian, pottery-making easily ranks first. This, in- 
deed, comes down directly from pre-Aztec times. 
Much the same forms, much the same colors and 
designs are made to-day as are dug up in pre- 
historic mounds. All Mexico, high and low, cooks 
in pottery vessels, glazed and finished, at least 
inside, and usually decorated with crude designs. 
But apparently glazing was unknown to the Indians 
before the Conquest, for the Dominican friars who 
assisted at the founding of the City of Puebla in 
1532 sent to their monastery of Talavera de la 
Reina, near Toledo, Spain, for glazers among the 
brotherhood to come to Mexico and guide the native 
potters in the making of glazed tiles for the decora- 
tion of the Puebla churches. Of so comparatively 
recent a foundation is the most famous and esteemed 
pottery of Mexico, the "Mexican Talavera." From 
this activity, of the Spaniards again, came virtually 
all of the glazed tiling which so beautifies the 
churches and many of the famous old houses of 
Mexico. 

The various designs of this majolica, in brilhant^ 
blues and yellows, are the mark of various epochs 
of the work, the oldest being the blue monochrome 
with white, heavily glazed but made entirely of 

1 Cf. Sylvester Baxter, "Spanish Colonial Architecture in 
Mexico," Boston, 1901. 

110 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

native clay, brittle red within, soft white outside, 
the difference being in the degree of firing. Moorish, 
Spanish and Chinese designs were used in the earlier 
wares, and later, when yellow and sometimes a 
Httle red were added, the designs became more 
distinctly Mexican. The Mexican Talavera of 
colonial times is gathered into many collections 
and has a decided intrinsic value, though it is dis- 
tinguished from the Spanish Talavera, which some 
of its designs imitated, by the fact that its blue is 
in appreciable relief, while the Spanish coloring is 
fiat and thin.^ Within the last century, the Tala- 
vera potteries, which had been virtually closed for 
many years, were reopened for the making of excel- 
lent imitations of the old work, imitations so good, 
in fact, that often only experts can distinguish the 
old from the new. The Talavera is chiefly found in 
tiles, often church domes apparently having been 
designed as a whole and worked out in matched 
pieces, although the usual type are tiles of ordinary 
size, roughly formed and crudely yet boldly de- 
signed. Washbasins, even bathtubs, and chief of 
all the tall cylindrical vases (originally designed for 
herbs and medicines, but now used for cut flowers) 
jardinieres and flowerpots, platters, plates and cups 
are other forms still found sometimes in the antique 
and imitated in the modern. 

Below the Talavera, the truer native types of 
pottery appear in profusion, but in designs and 
forms so distinct that one who knows Mexico can 

^ Cf. E. A. Barber, "Hispano-Moresque Pottery in the Collec- 
tion of the Hispanic Society of America," New York, 1915. 

Ill 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

distinguish the section — even the village — of their 
origin by form and color. The work is all done by 
hand, and the only tools are pieces of broken glass 
and a horsehair, the glass, straight or curved, being 
used to form the vessel, the hair to cut and trim 
the top. In many of the Mexican pottery villages 
wheels are unknown, the whole shaping of the 
vessels being by hand. 

The pottery of Oaxaca, especially of the Ocho 
Pueblos, is the commonest sort used in cooking, 
being heavily glazed and manufactured in large 
quantities for the trade which was originally and to 
a large extent still is carried on by the potters 
themselves, immense crates being transported on 
human and burro-back for great distances. It is 
of dull red clay, but the glazes are of olive green, in 
two shades, one so dark as to give the general dis- 
tinction of "green-and-black" to the product. 

Cuernavaca, not far from Mexico City, has 
famous pottery works in its suburb of San Anton, 
the chief and almost the only product (outside of 
trinkets and toys for the tourist trade) being the 
typical Mexican water bottles of porous clay which 
by the seepage and evaporation of the water on the 
outside keep that within cool and fresh. Cuernavaca 
pottery is brittle, so does not lend itself to large 
pieces. The workers make designs (most traditional 
and conventional) in inlaid bits of glass, broken 
porcelain and pebbles. The pottery of Guanajuato 
is of the same dark terra-cotta color, but of a better 
quality than that of Cuernavaca and is used exten- 
sively all over Mexico ; it dates from long before the 

112 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

Spanish conquest. One pottery in this district, still 
in operation, was founded by the patriot-priest 
Hidalgo, he who roused the Indians of his parish of 
Dolores to the first insurrection against Spain in 
1810. This pottery is usually decorated with the 
name of the town, but is sold broadcast in Mexican 
markets. 

About Guadalajara, to the west, are several pot- 
tery towns, the most important being those of 
Tonalan and Tlaquepaque. The latter name means 
literally ''the place where the jars are made," but 
of late years the business has diminished in im- 
portance, and the most esteemed products are 
figures made by native artists. Much skill is shown, 
especially in the making of statuettes of tipos 
popular es (popular types), figurines ten to fifteen 
inches high, delicately modeled in artistic and 
faithful reproduction, down to the last detail of 
sandal-thong, of the Mexican as he is. These figures, 
dressed in cloth and straw and leather, are of pot- 
tery, tinted in their actual colors and fired. Though 
unglazed, they compare favorably with similar 
statuettes in the conventional European porcelain, 
— truly works of native art. 

Tonalan is probably the most important pottery 
center in Mexico, the entire village, men, women 
and children, devoting themselves to the making 
of enormous quantities of jars, pots, cooking 
utensils, water bottles, etc. Both glazed and un- 
glazed wares are manufactured, the latter in all 
sizes, up to two or three feet in height, and fired so 
as to be slightly porous, to keep the contents cool 

113 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

by evaporation. The glazed ware is smaller but 
includes full-sized pots up to a gallon capacity or 
more, and is light and fireproof. Some very typical 
and artistic work is done, especially in the making 
of chocolate pots and similar vessels, which are 
decorated with conventional designs and well glazed. 
The colorings are exceptionally attractive, yellows, 
reds, blues and blacks being softened by a grayish 
glaze which gives them distinction and beauty. 

The potters of Mexico, who without exception 
are Indian, are true craftsmen, proud of their art 
and working in silent and happy absorption. The 
making of products other than pots and bottles 
is the industry of hundreds of villages, and every 
festival in every town in the country is the occasion 
for the visit of the makers of pottery toys and 
trinkets, the elaborate statuettes from the Guad- 
alajara section, the pottery figures dressed in 
delicately made hats, suits and dresses, of cloth, 
straw, leather and paper, being most entrancing. 
Each festival has its types of pottery figures. 
Virgins, Infant Christs and the whole furniture of 
the Bethlehem manger are purchasable at Christ- 
mas time for a few centavos, and for the festival 
of All Souls dancing skeletons of rattling pottery 
bones are offered in all sizes. In addition, pottery 
bells of varied shapes are to be had, and innumerable 
toys, mostly miniature household utensils, are of- 
fered even on ordinary market days. Often such 
articles as pottery bells are the sole product of a 
village, and the connoisseur can always find new 
varieties he has never seen before at almost any 

114 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

fair. The native designs, however, do not often 
change, although sometimes, as at Tonalan, where 
truly artistic work is done, the artisans will take up 
and develop, with native skill, ancient Aztec or 
coventionalized Indian patterns on order, and are 
not above adopting them as part of their regular 
product. 

Related to pottery making is the enameling of 
gourds, an ancient Indian art which flourished long 
before the Spaniards, probably long before the 
Aztecs. Its chief center is — or was— the beautiful 
subtropical town of Uruapam, in the garden state 
of Michoacan, although certain Oaxaca towns also 
maintain the industry. Gourds, grown for the pur- 
pose, are painted in elaborate and, in olden days, 
intricate designs, suggestive of the Chinese, and 
usually on a dark background. The enamel is a 
particular secret, its base being a plant louse per- 
haps related to the cochineal, although the paste 
which is made from it is ochre yellow in color and 
virtually colorless when used to give the lacquer- 
hke enamel which characterizes the product. The 
forms range all the way from large vessels as big 
as pumpkins down to enameled rattles made of half- 
grown gourds. Like so many of the ancient crafts 
of Mexico this has largely degenerated in late years 
to the production of garish articles for the trade of 
the fairs. 

The making of baskets, mats and hats antedates 
the Spaniards, and being designed primarily to meet 
native needs has been interfered with but little. The 
chief fabric for mats and "straw" hats is the fiber 

115 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

of palm trees, which is woven by hand rapidly and 
skilfully, but without great emphasis on the artistic, 
though a little fine hat weaving of the Milan and 
"Panama" types is done in some of the villages on 
the GuK Coast. The fiber, extracted from various 
species of palm, is kept moist, usually in tiny caves 
dug in the yards of the houses where the workers 
live. 

Soft baskets of conical shape are also made of 
palm fiber, but willow reeds and grasses are the 
chief basis of basket making. Certain specifically 
Mexican varieties are made of maguey fiber, ropes 
being twisted over and over with a thin, even cover- 
ing of the coarse, but silklike fabric, and painted 
in characteristic and colorful designs. 

The weaving of the maguey, ixtle and henequen 
fiber has been a native industry for many centuries. 
All are products of various species of the agave, 
or century .plant, henequen, with its long fiber, 
being one of the great commercial products of the 
world, known in the market as sisal hemp. Hene- 
quen and ixtle are extracted by machinery, but 
maguey fiber (from the leaves of the plant which 
produces the national drink, pulque) has to be 
extracted by hand, an Indian working with a 
sickle-shaped knife to strip the pulp down till 
from each leaf he has a great skein of glistening 
white threads. These he weaves by hand into 
cloth not unlike jute sacking in quality, although 
in Aztec times and even to-day it is sometimes 
made into closely woven, often beautiful materials. 
This he uses for packing, as a sling in which to 

116 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

carry bundles and even stones and earth; even 
yet it is sometimes made into clothing. It is also 
woven into a very good rope, from which bridles are 
fashioned for the tough-skinned native burros. 
From the tip of the maguey leaf the Indian can 
extract a great two-inch thorn, with a twist of 
fiber three feet long attached — a needle-and-thread 
which doubtless served the ancient Aztecs, as it 
serves their descendants, for rough sewing. 

In Yucatan, where henequen is the great crop, 
the natives make a variety of native hammocks, 
and twenty years ago their hand-woven products 
were sold all over the world. To-day machinery 
has displaced them, but Yucatan still manufactures 
the finest hanunocks in the world, often of hard 
cotton or linen cord as well as of the rough hene- 
quen fiber. The Yucatan hammock is theoretically 
wide enough for one to sleep full-length, crosswise, 
and it is indeed the safest, coolest and most com- 
fortable bed for the tropics. 

Another industry which the Spaniards did not 

intentionally discourage was that of weaving. 

The Aztecs had long woven beautiful garments and 

textiles from cotton, which they raised on cultivated 

plantations. The fabric was of fine texture and 

especially beautiful so that it became the dress for 

the members of the richer classes and not until the 

years had brought cheaper methods of manufacture 

did the native change from his rough raiment of 

maguey fiber or leather to the softer and more 

comfortable cotton characteristic of his dress to-day. 

Cotton weaving by hand, however, was one of the 

117 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

industries which was almost ruined by the cheaper 
methods of production in Europe and the better 
materials which were furnished, and also by the 
extinction of the Aztec upper classes, who were the 
chief patrons of the fine native cotton weavers. 

The native rebozo makers were in the beginning 
itinerant tradesmen carrying a spinning wheel and 
hand loom and weaving to order these colorful 
and delicate lengths of cotton in designs still extant. 
Rebozos were important products of the cotton- 
weaving industry of Mexico for most of the 
centuries of the Spanish regime. After the Inde- 
pendence the opening of the country to foreign 
imports again discouraged the native manufactures, 
and although from time to time efforts have been 
made to revive it, the native cotton industry as an 
art no longer exists. Modern factories now produce 
rehozos in the classical designs, colors and weaves, 
and these fully satisfy the popular taste. 

The Mexican soon learned to work with wool 
after its introduction in 1541, and the zarapes or 
serapes, blankets of typical design and coloring, 
are a distinctly native art which is still preserved. 
Comparatively little handwork is now done, how- 
ever, and the wonderfully fine zarapes of Zacatecas 
and Saltillo are now but a memory and a relic of 
the collector. These beautifully designed, colored 
and woven blankets were perfectly impermeable to 
water and lasted for generations, while the coarse 
Mexican machine-woven blankets of to-day, of 
unselected wool, deserve very little recognition 

except as a part of the typical costume of the native. 

118 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

The woolen industry, which reached its prime 
during the colonial period, was a grafted art intro- 
duced by the Spaniards, although it is probable 
that the brilliant colorings used in the woolen 
zarapes of that era were the direct inheritance from 
and the only survival of the wonderful cotton 
timatli of Aztec princes. The fine quality of the 
earUer products and the later deterioration may be 
in part due to the fact that merino sheep were in- 
troduced into Mexico in 1541, and animals bearing 
coarser wool did not appear until later. 

The use of silk in Mexico goes back to pre- 
Spanish times, Cortez having spoken of the silk 
which was sold in the markets of Mexico. In some 
of the museums there are pictures woven entirely 
in silk, said to be the work of ancient Indians, but 
apparently the fiber was not used to any great 
extent previous to Spanish times. The raising of 
silk and its manufacture in Mexico was prohibited 
by the Spaniards during the colonial regime because 
silk was one of the perquisites of the Crown. The 
only native product of silk that is of interest is the 
beautiful silk rehozos, now made of thread silk, by 
hand, in the classic designs, relatively expensive, 
and used by Mexican ladies as a light wrap. 

One of the ancient arts of Mexico which was pre- 
served by the Spaniards in the convents and has 
come down to this day is the making of drawn 
work, an elaboration of hemstitching to most 
intricate and beautiful designs. The delicate cot- 
ton of the Aztecs was worked in this form before 
the Spaniards came, and although the delicacy 

119 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

which was attained later was not common in the 
Aztec period, the Aztecs must probably be given 
the credit for this art. Its preservation, however, 
is largely due to convent training, for it was within 
their walls that the finest specimens of drawn linen 
were made. The quality of this material and its 
unique perfection in Mexico make it one of her best- 
known artistic products, but even before the recent 
revolution, the art was on the decline, owing to the 
low prices which were paid and the opening of new 
and more lucrative employments to women. Like 
the laces of Europe, the production now depends 
almost entirely upon the industry of nurses and 
nuns, with the added difficulty that drawn work 
is not so conveniently handled, and thus is not 
often a by-product of other duties as laces may be. 

Embroidery was, until recently, a noteworthy art 
in Mexico, although, like drawn work, economic and 
revolutionary conditions have now almost destroyed 
it. Mexican women of all classes worked in silks 
especially and in tinsels, and the church services 
were very masterpieces of heavy and beautiful 
embroidery, while not the least of its output went 
to the decoration of men's native charro costume, 
both suits and hats. At the height of the vogue of 
this home art, Mexican women wore the most 
elaborately embroidered gowns, even gold and silver 
being affected. 

The working of leather has been one of the true 
native arts of Mexico since long before the Span- 
iards brought in the craft of book binding. Al- 
though to-day mechanical means are used in the 

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MEXICAN CULTURE 

manufacture of the Mexican ''carved leather" 
purses, belts and trinkets, much native skill but 
very little originality has long been turned in this 
direction. Saddlery, of course, came after the 
Spanish introduction of horses, but previously 
leather was one of the materials from which clothing 
was manufactured, and the work of the modern 
Mexican leather carver has a racial heritage, at 
least, from Aztec artisans. Mexican saddles are 
particularly esteemed for their elaborateness, but 
retain little of the artistry which doubtless once 
distinguished them. 

Not a Uttle of the present industry of silver work- 
ing owes its preservation, however, to Mexican 
leather work, for it is in the silver mountings of 
saddles and the furnishing of silver clasps and but- 
tons, often of beautiful design, for charro costumes, 
that the truly native art finds expression. This is 
the last glimmering of an ancient industry, for even 
though we have no notable examples of Aztec gold 
and silver work, we must believe that it had not a 
little merit, although probably far from the aston- 
ishing order which the conquerors described. 

The feather work of Mexico to-day has no rela- 
tionship, except geographic, to the wonderful and 
elaborate art of the Aztecs. Some of the ornaments 
and cloaks of the Aztec rulers, made from feathers 
of humming birds and the birds of paradise, prob- 
ably surpassed anything of this sort that was ever 
done in the South Seas or in China. Some of the 
feather mantles and ornaments preserved in mu- 
seums indicate even with their great age an art far 

121 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

beyond anything which exists in Mexico to-day. 
Modern Mexican feather work is made merely by 
fastening bits of colored (usually dyed) feathers on 
cards by means of wax or glue, the designs being 
almost invariably representations of birds. The 
Aztec work, on the other hand, was woven into 
fabrics, glorious in color, perfect and unique in 
design and workmanship. 

The Mexican appreciation of music is one of the 
artistic traits which comes in for generous notice 
at the hands of almost every traveler. The silent, 
apparently rapt attention with which the lowliest 
peon will listen to the village band is remarked 
upon invariably, without apparently taking into 
consideration the fact that the savage and the child 
alike are always charmed by rhythm and easy 
harmony. Most of the music discoursed in Mexico 
is primarily rhythmical, is played with color and 
spirit, but it is no more noteworthy as art than the 
most average music appreciated by any other 
people. 

The Mexican band, even in small towns (and 
every town has a band, usually belonging to the 
army or the police department), plays well, because 
it plays rhythmically, and because its repertory is 
not extensive and no attempts are made to get too 
deep into the classics. There are, of course, a few 
fine bands in the country, and in certain centers a 
true appreciation of the finest music. There have 
been a few Mexican composers, so that performance 
and appreciation are not the only forms of music 
in the country. Their number, in proportion to the 

122 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

supposedly ^'musical" population, is relatively 
small, and their compositions are usually of the 
most popular type. Only a few, such as "La. 
Paloma", ''La Golondrina" and ''Sobre las Olas" 
have had vogue abroad. 

We have almost no way of knowing the nature of 
the Aztec music. What has come down to us is 
piecemeal, and was long ago transposed to modern 
scale. The Indians, however, seem to bring in, 
always, the minor note, especially in their improvi- 
sation, but this can well be explained by the heritage 
of Spanish custom, for Catalan music affects the 
minor key and much so-called Mexican musical 
taste is traceable to Spanish emigrants from this 
province. There are almost no Aztec musical instru- 
ments in museums to-day. Only a few of the great 
drums which belonged to the temples are preserved, 
but we know that drums, wooden and pottery pipes 
were used. As in so much else, the Spanish has 
completely displaced the Indian music which it 
found. 

One of the delightful features of the Mexican love 
of music, however, is the soft chanting to be heard 
in the half-melancholy, half-wistful songs which 
often filter through the dawn in towns and on the 
haciendas as the laborers go about their early 
chores. In some of the primitive sections of the 
country, improvisation is quite an art. There is 
a certain standard in the ability to improvise a 
stanza, in both the singer's invention and the qual- 
ity of his voice — high, strained tenor, with an elabo- 
rate falsetto, being the common tone. Itinerant 

123 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

native players, usually harpists or flutists, often 
improvise and can make a night interesting or 
hideous, as the listener's mood is, by their descrip- 
tive chants as they lead half-drunken parties home 
from a baile (ball). 

Stringed instruments are common and at native 
dances form often the whole orchestra. It may be 
added, also, that a far larger proportion of Mexicans, 
men and women, can play some instrument than 
is common among other peoples, but, as Mme. 
Calderon de la Barca wrote many years ago, ''When 
I say that they play, I do not mean that they play 
well." 

Far from the least of the musical features of 
Mexican hfe is the dance. A ball is the common 
form of entertainment, with high and low, and a 
company of otherwise perfectly sane Mexicans will 
gather in a stuffy hall and with the greatest appar- 
ent enjoyment dance upon each other's toes and 
upon the toes of the older people who wait as 
chaperones from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. for nine nights 
in succession at the time of the posadas or pre- 
Christmas festivals. The Indians and the peons 
celebrate everything with a dance, and sandaled 
men and barefoot women will hop about to an off- 
key stringed orchestra on a dancing floor of gravel 
(which is the proper floor when you dance barefoot) 
with solemn deUght in the hours before midnight 
and thereafter with noisy hilarity, when the liquor 
has been flowing freely, until dawn. 

Dancing is one of the few forms of native folklore 
which have come down to to-day. Religious festi- 

124 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

vals, national holidays and tribal feasts are cele- 
brated in Indian villages with dances, in pantomime 
depicting the lives of animals, or the ancient battles 
between the Spaniards (with papier-mache horses 
about their waists) and the Aztecs, or other battles 
between the ''Jews" (with masks having great 
hooked noses) and ''Christians" (in flowing white 
robes), or sometimes in unintelligible rites with 
crudely costumed characters. All is to the accom- 
paniment of a drum and flute, the drum often the 
toy device made for children, the flute as often as 
not of tin or pottery. 

Mexican folklore is otherwise surprisingly shal- 
low, both in legends and in imaginative characters. 
Fairies are all but unknown, the only correspond- 
ence to them that has been noted being brownies or 
mischievous male spirits which appear to dehght 
only in pranks and may indeed be a European 
importation. 

The peons, however, believe in love philters, 
ghosts, the evil eye, magical remedies for disease, 
witches, magicians and giants. The ghost is almost 
the chief business of Mexican folklore and the 
legends of the City of Mexico, of Spanish origin, 
have to do ahnost entirely with foul murders, as 
in our own ghost lore. The Indians, however, pay 
surprisingly httle attention to the bloody side of 
these manifestations, and their ghosts seem to be 
concerned with their money and other treasure. 
Thomas A. Janvier, who wrote so much and so 
charmingly of Mexico, made a serious study of 
Mexican folklore, but found himself balked at 

125 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

almost every turn at the lack of interest in the 
upper classes in his search. 

Mexicans of the lower class [he wrote] know that their 
superiors among their own people laugh at superstitious 
beliefs and therefore could not understand why anyone not of 
their own class,— even though a foreigner and therefore a 
person whose habits are expected to be at once extraordinary 
and irrational — can regard these things seriously. 

The Mexican superstitions, however, are very 
likely to be so tied up with churchly lore that, save 
as an index of religious preoccupation, they are of 
little significance. 

There remains to be said something of the 
European culture which, implanted by the Span- 
iards, has been so vital a psychological factor in 
Mexico down to to-day. The greatest contribution 
was certainly architecture, and indeed beyond 
that there is an astonishing dearth of any- 
thing that can be said to have become truly iden- 
tified with Mexico. During the early days of the 
viceroys, some of the Indians (the most notable 
of them Ixtilxochitl), writing in their own language 
with Spanish letters, set down the legends of their 
tribes, but after this first burst, almost none but 
Creoles and Spaniards took any part in Mexican 
intellectual life for three hundred years. The great 
Spanish dramatist, Alarcon, was born in Mexico, 
but Mexico hardly claims him, for he early went 
to Spain. In addition there were not a few note- 
worthy, if not notable, artists and writers. One 
of the most interesting of the latter was the Mexican 
nun (of Spanish descent), Sor Juana Inez de la 

126 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

Cruz, called in Mexico "the tenth muse", a poetess, 
philosopher, mathematician and musician, who 
Uved in the late seventeenth century. Baron von 
Humboldt, visiting Mexico in 1793, spoke of her, 
as he did of one or two other writers, but he also 
mentioned two artists. One was Tolsa, who cast 
the great "bronze horse", a statue of Charles IV, 
in Mexico City, and "renovated" the churches to 
their present bare Romanesque interiors. The 
other was Miguel Cabrera, an Indian (1695-1768). 
Cabrera, of the tribe of Zapotecs which produced 
Juarez, painted pictures compared by enthusiasts 
with Murillo, and suggestive, as Philip Terry re- 
marks, of some of the fine Luca Giordano frescoes 
in the Escorial. He apparently never studied in 
Europe and has a distinct style of his own, which 
he imparted to both his many copies and to the 
hundreds of his original works which adorn Mexican 
churches. Another Mexican painter of the six- 
teenth century is Jose Maria Ibarra (1688-1756), 
who was a careful copyist of Murillo, then most 
popular in Mexico, and also an originator of many 
finely finished works. Francisco Eduardo de Tres- 
guerras (1765-1833) was a Creole, an artist of many 
accomplishments, his paintings, like those of so 
many other Mexicans, being so deeply influenced 
by the popularity of Murillo as to be almost copies 
of his style. In the years since the first revolu- 
tion, few Mexican artists have been developed, 
although a number of promising students were sent 
abroad by General Diaz, and such young men as 

Ribera y Martinez (a mestizo). Angel Zarraga (a 

127 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Creole) may yet make true contributions to Mexican 
art. 

In literature there is more to be said. Sor Juana 
Inez de la Cruz has been mentioned. Jose Joaquin 
Fernandez de Lizardi (1771-1827) signed himself 
"The Mexican Thinker" and was the author of the 
first Mexican classic, "Periquillo Sarniento/' re- 
ferred to as the "Mexican Gil Bias", his book having 
brought him prompt disfavor in the viceregal court 
and six months' imprisonment. Many minor but 
vivid writers appeared in the early years of the 
Independence, pamphleteers, and indeed several 
historians and poets. The important "Historia de 
Mejico", of Lucas Alaman, was published in 1852. 
During this period many poets appeared, but most 
of the literary energy of the time was devoted to 
political periodicals and pamphlets. Manuel Car- 
pio was an able poet of this period, however, and 
in 1870 Manuel Acuna, a poet still loved and 
admired, wrote his "Pasion arias", and a few years 
later Guillermo Prieto (1818-1897) published the 
first of his many popular lyrics. From the last 
of the revolutionary days and through that of 
Diaz, Mexican literature is really rich, despite 
the fact that Americans and EngUshmen hardly 
know even the names of such masters as Manuel 
Orozco y Berra, editor of "Mexico a Traves de los 
Siglos", and author of the authoritative "Historia 
Antigua y de la Conquista de Mexico"; Ignacio 
M. Altamarino and such poets as Jose Peon y 
Contreras, Juan de Dios Peza, Vicente Riva Palacio, 
Juan Diaz Covarrubias, Justo Sierra, Antonio 

128 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

Plaza, and many others, by no means either minor 
poets or mere styhsts. Amado Nervo and Jesus 
Urueta, both of whom died recently in South 
America, were masters recognized throughout the 
Spanish-speaking world. From men still living 
there have been many notable contributions, both 
to prose and poetry, for in the latter the Mexican 
seems especially skilled. But as in the revolution 
of the early nineteenth century, the revolution of 
the early twentieth century has turned the writers 
of Mexico into hurlers of philippics or noisy 
partisans, till even the best of art is lost in the 
bitterness of controversy. Mention must be made, 
however, of two (although they are of the older 
school), Federico Gamboa, a great poet and essay- 
ist, and Emilio Rabasa, a popular novelist and a 
powerful publicist. 

There is usually, however, a true ideahstic note 
in Mexican hterature that makes one feel for the 
same note in her other cultures. But there the 
masters are not so sure; the hand lacks something 
of the cunning of the voice (written or spoken) — 
strange enough in a people who have so great 
reproductive skill among their artisans. To be sure, 
as critics have said, there is much of the verbal 
fluorescence, too much of adorning for adornment's 
sake, perhaps, but aside from all the mass that 
deserves such criticism, there are true artists in 
words, masters who express a genuine ideahsm, in 
true as well as ringing phrases. 

During the Diaz epoch, and to a lesser extent 

under the presidents who have followed him, many 

129 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

young Mexicans, men and women, have been sent 
abroad on government pensions, chiefly to the 
United States and to Europe, to study, this one 
painting, that one sculpture, others music and 
architecture. They have been a true leaven in the 
Mexican cultural mass and have served, on their 
return, as teachers in art schools and as the creators, 
in ideal at least, of a native art. How deep the 
leaven will go we have not had time or opportunity 
to realize. As with American and British students 
who go abroad, there is always the question as to 
whether their foreign masters, teaching, one a 
French, one an Italian method, may not also 
inculcate French and Italian ideals of beauty, when 
Mexico needs, and needs so badly, Mexican ideals 
and Mexican beauty. For Mexico has yet to pro- 
duce a landscapist who has put her wonders on 
canvas, or a musician who has sung the song of her 
heart. 

In fact, one of the confusing phases of Mexican 
esthetics has come from the adoption of French 
standards in literature and in art. Education in 
French schools was for a long time the proper thing 
for the children of high-class families, and Mexico 
sought consciously during the Diaz regime to be- 
come a miniature Paris in America. Even Spanish 
customs suffer a certain disrepute in the Mexican 
mind when compared with French cultural stand- 
ards, a lingering memory, perhaps, of the years of 
bitter revolution. 

The Mexican standard of culture is largely 
ornamental, and the French school which is most 

130 



MEXICAN CULTURE 

favored is not the modern French, which is so 
soundly based upon the philosophy of our own day. 
The Mexican emphasizes classical learning, the dead 
languages, ancient philosophy, etc., and his music 
and art are likely to be superficial and based upon 
neither an understanding of the laws of harmony 
nor upon a deep study of the principles of graphic 
art. 

In the use of books the Mexicans are distinctly 
behind other peoples (as their educational conditions 
predicate), and although there are some fine 
libraries these are mostly confined to ecclesiastical 
works and histories, more or less ancient. The 
beautiful libraries in Mexico City and the other 
State capitals are open to students and are used 
extensively, but there are no popular circulating 
hbraries and the providing of cheap literature for 
the people is a problem that has not yet been even 
approached. The newspapers have some depart- 
ments which, like those of the French, have signed 
columns of comment on current events and upon the 
gossip of the day, giving something of a broadening 
outlook and forming perhaps the most interesting 
recent contributions to Mexican literature. 

Here, where we step definitely toward the prob- 
lem of the diffusion of culture, we are brought to 
the realization that in the higher planes of art and 
literature, even of really good, music, we are in a 
region far removed from the mass of the Mexican 
people, who have neither eyes nor ears to enjoy 
fully, nor minds to create. Truly, Mexican culture 
has grown, like an orchid, far from the soil of its 

131 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

people. It seems to clarify our understanding to 
realize this and to think that most of the intellectual 
advancement which is recorded there to-day is as 
exotic as the shelf of English novels which the 
Saxon pioneer carries with him to the jungle. Yet 
when the white man bent down to plant his seeds 
deep in the warm soil of Mexico, they grew, and 
the flowering was wondrous beautiful, bequeathing 
to Mexico and to all who visit there the glory of 
towering masses of stone and tile and captured 
sunlight. The hope of Mexico is in such cultural 
fusion, and because it has been done, it can and 
will be done again, and well indeed may we believe 
in and dream of that day. 



132 



CHAPTER VI 

THE MEXICAN MIND 

THE mind of a Mexican marches through its 
pantomime of solemn thought, of thrilling 
emotion, of drifting volition before the curtain of 
its accumulated traditions. Its temperament, its 
customs, its play and its culture give the color to 
the drama of its life, but it is the processes of thought 
and feeling and will which are the dynamics of that 
life. And the greatest of these is thought, the 
intellectual process, the way and the direction of 
his thinking. 

In looking at Mexican psychology one finds it 
easy to understand why the popular philosophical 
creed of Mexico has ever been that of Compte, the 
belief that the intellect is the dominating factor in 
life. Whatever the truth or falsity of the Compte 
philosophy when applied to the Anglo-Saxon, or 
even to the European Latin, any conscious study 
of the Mexican brings one into full accord with its 
most sweeping tenets. 

The Mexican intellect does seem indeed the 
dominating factor in all Mexican mental processes. 
Emotional the Mexican mind may appear, weak- 
willed in its individual and group reactions, yet 

always there is a calculated weighing of what is 

133 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

worth while. The decision may be short-sighted, 
but it, is logical in its development from whatever 
premise it may take, and often inexorable in cling- 
ing to its choice. Mexican emotion is largely an 
intellectual product, the very manifestations of sex 
being calculated and self-hypnotic, the wild orgies 
of revolution the result of a determined if ignorant 
choice of the easiest way to satisfactions. Will is 
the slave of traditions and of the decisions of the 
moment, for the faith in traditions goes deep into 
the thought of centuries, and a choice once made, 
uncontrolled and ill-considered though it may be, 
is unswervingly followed (unless displaced by a 
later choice) though the end be personal death or 
national annihilation. The ''inconsistencies" of 
the Mexican character are rather the result of a 
consistency so colossal as to be incomprehensible to 
minds more deeply scarred by the wheel of experi- 
ence. The Mexican seems to have a child's or a 
savage's unwavering grasp of the details of desire 
and of the things he hopes for, — a heritage 
from the Indian which centuries of white rule and 
oceans of white blood have never eradicated. 
Circumstance, which in other races will bring that 
quick adaptation which marks a people's right to 
survival, meets in the Mexican a dull or a fervid 
yet unthinking opposition. 

Circumstance falls before the onrush of national 
tradition or else circumstance crushes and ruins an 
entire era with the force of that inertia which less 
consistent peoples would have turned to the work 
of their national advancement. Of such scenes as 

134 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

this clash of the Mexican mind with circumstances 
has been made Mexican history. The golden era of 
Mexico tm-ned upon Diaz's adaptation of the cir- 
cumstance of threatened American intervention to 
the pacification of all the rebel chieftains of the 
country. The chaos of Carranza turned upon the 
refusal of that wily but unimaginative Mexican 
to adapt his course to the circumstances which were 
working upon him. 

So throughout all Mexican life the intellectual 
weighmg of a few fixed premises results ever in 
definite decisions whose development with inex- 
orable logic sets a course which can be changed 
only by the impact of some idea or intellectual force 
from without; never does that gift which we call 
imagination invent a new course or adapt a cir- 
cumstance into a power for advancement. Each 
problem must have in it, for the Mexican, the 
elements of its solution, or the solution never comes. 
He who deals successfully with the Mexican mind 
offers problems in their simplicity, with the neces- 
sary decision buried within them, and, above all, 
without extraneous suggestions which give the 
basis for intellectual quibbhng far outside the 
course it is desired for the Mexican to follow. 

No serious student since Baron Humboldt's time 
has disputed his conclusion as to the total lack of 
imagination which is so deep-rooted a character- 
istic of the Mexican mind. Even Mexicans of the 
highest type, virtually pure-blooded Spaniards in 
their ancestry, evince a lack of this creative spark 
as astonishing as it is depressing. So general is this 

135 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

that great foreign corporations working in Mexico 
have as their fixed pohcy the use of Mexican engi- 
neers and officials only in the executive and detailed 
sections of their business. The entire creative 
process, the making of plans and the determination 
of policy is left in the hands of foreigners alone. 
Foreigners have dreamed the dreams that have 
built modern Mexico, and after those dreams to 
the minutest detail have been conunitted to paper, 
then and then only do they call upon the capable and 
able Mexicans whom the outsider (and the Mexican) 
would expect them to use from the beginning. 

Porfirio Diaz probably had more imagination 
than any other Mexican who ever lived, and for 
this trait alone, if for no other, he would have been 
worthy of the place which he held and holds in 
Mexican and in world history. His fault and his 
ultimate fall came from his inability to find more 
than half a dozen Mexicans among those whom he 
could trust who had a true spark of that imagina- 
tion which makes men and nations great. Those 
men grew old and they died, and as Diaz himself 
grew old, he could not seek out those few who could 
have succeeded his old advisers. The duty of the 
dreaming, of the planning, of the directing fell ever 
upon shoulders weakening with age, till they, too, 
failed to carry it. 

That Mexicans of imagination and vision did 
live then outside the circles of government goes 
without saying. That they live to-day is equally 
true, but the roles that they should have played, and 
that they or men like them must play before Mexico 

136 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

is redeemed from within herself, are taken by the 
motley crowd of revolutionaries and unimaginative 
sycophants who follow the rote of endless imitation 
and crude insistence upon the concrete and personal 
process which has made their land a mockery and 
its institutions a byword. 

It is perhaps this one lack of imagination which 
sets the Mexican Indian and the typical Mexican 
mixed-blood alike apart from the great rule of 
psychology that the minds of men differ not in 
their processes but in their valuation of things. 
This alone would make logical the statement set 
down at the beginning of this book, — that the 
Mexican mind travels in cycles and on planes dif- 
ferent from ours. It indeed sets that mind apart 
and accounts, in a measure which the world may 
grasp with difficulty, for the astonishing inabihty 
of most foreigners and particularly of most foreign 
governments to understand and to manage intel- 
hgently the Mexicans with whom they have con- 
tact. If the real difference between the days of 
Diaz and those of his predecessors and successors 
can be put into psychological terms, it will be by 
keying it to this same note of imagination. Diaz 
himseh could be fired by the innate truth of a great 
idea and a far-reaching plan; those executives who 
preceded him and who have followed him work 
themselves up to an emotional excitement which 
passes for imaginative appreciation, but they have 
actually no grasp of the essence of such apprecia- 
tion. One man may not indeed make an age, but 
the imitation by his people of his mind and vision 

137 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

can — and in the case of Diaz did — give impetus to 
vast advancement. 

Imitation is, over vast areas of human thought, 
the sole practicable means of achievement. Just 
as the imitation of the deeds and the ideas of great 
men is the inspiration of all of lesser power, so to 
such a people as the Mexicans the works and 
thoughts of their leaders exercise an influence often 
out of all proportion to the abihties and contribu- 
tion of those leaders. When the leader is such a 
man as Diaz, the imitation is relatively a virtue, 
but the difficulty with imitation is that in its 
purity it is quite unreasoning, and is just as likely 
— if not more likely — to take the bad traits as it 
is to choose the good. 

The savage mind, and to a large extent any un- 
cultured mind such as that of the average Mexican, 
thinks in undirected musing, reasoning only by 
the association of one concrete thing with its 
habitual or usual successor, never analyzing into 
their component parts the events or the thoughts 
that come to him. Therefore he does not store up 
in his mind a collection of the qualities or essences 
of the experiences he has had or of the thoughts 
that occur to him. He has nothing in his mind 
to add to any new idea which is presented. He 
cannot give it impetus by any addition from within 
his own mind, and his thought processes must func- 
tion with nothing more inspiring than the elements 
which each situation brings with it. There is no 
summation of stimuli, no reassembling of recollec- 
tions that the various elements of an idea are good 

138 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

or bad. Minds of this sort are the imitative type, 
with no series of pigeonholes from which to take 
out the elements of imagination.^ 

Such minds as that of the average Mexican are 
imitative because in order to think and so to act, 
they require such a colossal sum of immediate 
stimuli that only by the terrific impact of example 
can they move to intelligent action. The imagina- 
tive mind gathers, by observation and analysis, a 
succession, continuous or interrupted, of the sug- 
gestions or stimuli bearing upon a certain action 
and the means of performing it, and through the 
retention of those stimuli in mind ultimately per- 
forms the act, — and we call it the result of pure 
reasoning or imagination. The uncultivated mind 
cannot retain those stimuli; it has nothing to asso- 
ciate them together. Therefore only by the process 
of example, hurling the entire force of the accumu- 
lated intelligence of generations into the mind to- 
gether, can the act be brought to fruition. The 
typical Mexican mind is of this class, imitative and 
never creative, associating concrete acts without 
dissociating the essences of those acts that might 
be gathering for the ultimate solution of some 
future similar problem. The imitative faculty of the 
Mexican is thus not even cumulative; it does not 
save up what it has learned for a similar problem, 
but must be taught anew for each situation and each 
process. All this has been learned through many 



1 In general, the classifications of the great psychologist, William 
James, are followed here. Cf. WiUiam James, "Principles of Psy- 
chology," New York, 1913. 

139 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

failures and after many blasted hopes by the foreign 
corporations, which have finally discovered how to 
train their Mexican and Indian employes. So 
long as each process was itself explainable and im- 
related, success followed them, but no Mexican of 
the lower classes could ever associate his knowledge 
with the exigencies of any new situation. 

The stupidity of people in the life of Europe and 
the United States is largely their stupidity in the 
selection of the important detail of anything that 
is to be understood; the stupidity of the Mexican, 
and especially of the Indian, is entirely in his utter 
inability to select any detail at all. The Mexican 
is stumped by the whole situation because he cannot 
analyze it; the European is stumped because he 
made a wrong selection of the important or motivat- 
ing detail. An American newspaper correspondent 
has told, with picturesque color, the story of a 
Mexican bootblack who was quite unable to polish 
the American's shoes because they were a shade of 
brown which none of his pots of paste would match, 
— he could not extract the essence of an approximate 
color as it would have been extracted by an American 
bootblack. The solution was achieved by the 
higher intellect of the American patron, who sug- 
gested, in pantomime, that the bootblack use all his 
different colored pastes in succession. As he de- 
scribed the result, the appearance of a creative im- 
agination upon the horizon of the Mexican's intellect 
brought relief and joy — and a meticulous imitation of 
the idea which the American had extracted for him.^ 

^ Rowland Thomas, in the Sunday World, New York, July, 1920. 
140 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

For the Mexican is an empirical thinker. He 
works his problems out by ''rule of thumb", trial 
and error and trial again being his chief process of 
reasoning. He will follow tradition first, and if 
tradition furnishes no solution or any related con- 
ditions from which he may, by experiment, achieve 
the result which a reasoning mind would reach by 
deduction, he is completely nonplussed and utterly 
unable to work out of his dilemma. This is attested 
in cruel concreteness by the condition of the rolling 
stock of the Mexican railways as this is written, 
when hundreds of locomotives rust in the yards 
because the problems of their repair are utterly 
beyond the mental faculty of the relatively efficient 
Mexican mechanics who alone have charge of the 
railway shops since the exile of their foreign foremen 
in 1914. 

A concomitant of this empirical process of thought 
is the well-known fact that the Mexican mind can 
and does conceive brilliant and beautiful ''plans" 
and "proposals" for all sorts of projects, practical 
and idealistic, but is utterly lost when it comes 
to working those same plans out in detail and put- 
ting them into execution. The average foreigner, 
recognizing the sincerity back of the thoroughly 
workable ideas propounded by Mexican govern- 
ments and Mexican executives, naturally expects 
to see the plans developed and ultimately realized. 
It usually takes him years of disappointment and 
slowly waning surprise to make up his mind finally 
that the more brilliant and necessary the Mexican's 
plan, the more unlikely it is to come into realiza- 

141 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

tion. It usually takes him even longer to realize 
that the failure of these promised ideals is far more 
often due to the individual Mexican's psychological 
inability to face and solve a new problem than to 
any innate ''cussedness" in the Mexican nation. 

All this is merged, in its turn, into another phase 
of Mexican thinking, touched on above, — the un- 
doubted fact that the Mexican mind works from 
concretes, and that one concrete thought or sug- 
gestion brings up in the Mexican mind not the 
abstract thought which is its shadow, but another, 
related, concrete thought. An empirical thinker 
like the Mexican sees only the relationship of the 
event or thing to other similar events or things; 
he never cuts up either into its essential elements; 
he never extracts the detail that he knows from the 
whole that he does not know, but must find in his 
memory or experience another whole event or thing 
which is similar to that which he is regarding. The 
Mexican explains things in parables, instead of 
reasoning them out, paralleling the entire situation 
with another entire situation which he knows and 
understands. He does this and that because it is 
the custom, because his ancestors have done it, 
and not because it has any one essential thing 
which he recognizes as beneficial. 

The abstract type of thinking is far from absent 
in the Mexican world, however. The most ab- 
struse of philosophers are to be found not only 
among the Mexican higher and educated classes, 
with European blood and training, but also among 
the shrewd Indians of the villages of the interior. 

142 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

But in virtually all of their reasoning is to be found 
this one significant quality, — the necessity of a con- 
crete basis from which to work, the acquisition of 
concrete ideas and conceptions as the elements of 
every phase of the discussion. In other words, 
the Mexican philosopher or dialectician of whatever 
class must invariably work from a concrete premise, 
and his examples and his development of his theme 
will be brought only from other concrete bases. 

All but the very best Mexican minds seem utterly 
incapable of bringing to any situation, even to the 
creation of a work of art, any spirit or force save a 
concrete suggestion or a concrete inspiration. The 
most popular books written by Mexicans are 
based on concrete themes; their novels are those 
''with a purpose" or, what is equally concrete, 
obviously created under the inspiration of the 
works of others. Their pictures are essentially 
religious themes, landscapes or faithful portraits; 
their music is reminiscent or frankly onomatopoetic. 
Of the serious literary works, the chief themes are 
historical or works based on the admitted suggestion 
of the themes of others. This does not mean that 
there have not been real contributions to world 
Hterature and art from Mexico, for there have been 
many such. But in one way or another, all of them 
tend to support the conclusion that the Mexican 
mind (due to climate, race or whatever cause there 
may be) is essentially of the concrete type. From 
any concrete premise it can travel in elaborate 
and often thrilling flights of fancy or of logic, but 
never does it work with any but the elements pre- 

143 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

sented in the original concrete theme, unless sup- 
plemented, not by abstract ideas or clear imagina- 
tion, but by equally concrete themes or examples 
brought in from without. 

A curious and illuminating example of this phase 
of the best Mexican minds is presented in the his- 
tory of the diplomatic relations of the United 
States with various Mexican governments. The 
Washington government was, during the intendancy 
of Carranza as president of Mexico, tripped up, 
nonplussed and routed, diplomatically, again and 
again by what was considered the wily diplomacy 
of that stubborn Mexican executive. The actual 
method of achieving American discomfiture was 
through the brazen arguments of the Mexican 
Foreign Office which again and again, as the Amer- 
ican notes arrived, took those austere documents 
and gleefully turned their firmness to ridicule by 
the most detailed and philosophical discussion of 
the most abstruse points of legal and diplomatic 
procedure. Almost all such discussion was directed, 
not at the demands of the American government 
upon the Carranza government, but at the tactful 
American suggestions that Mexico comply with 
those demands in certain specified ways. To the 
Anglo-Saxon those suggested means were the de- 
visings of kindly and scholarly American officials 
for making compliance easy; to the Mexican mind 
they were heaven-sent opportunities for endless 
quibbUng and insolent delays, all of which were care- 
fully within the law and diplomatic precedent. 

The historic parallels for this method of Car- 

144 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

ranza's are to be found throughout the entire diplo- 
matic history of the two countries, but in that 
history one record stands out in illuminating con- 
trast. This was the note sent by Secretary Evarts 
to Porfirio Diaz in 1878, not long after he ascended 
to the Mexican presidency. This Evarts note de- 
manded much the same things that other American 
notes have always demanded, protection to Amer- 
ican lives and property and a reasonable state of 
peace along the Mexican border, but it had this 
unique quality, — that it did not suggest how the 
American government expected the Mexican gov- 
ernment to comply. It stated definitely that "the 
Government of the United States ... is not 
sohcitous, it never has been, about the methods or 
ways in which this protection shall be accomplished. 
. . . Protection, in fact ... is the sole point upon 
which the United States are tenacious." 

Here, be it noted, was no presentation of means; 
no phase of the subject but the fact itself was left 
open for discussion. The result, the world knows, 
was that Diaz called in his chieftains and told them 
that the note meant American intervention unless 
Mexico behaved, and largely upon that threat was 
built the thirty years of his great peace. Not even 
Diaz could find in the Evarts note a basis for quib- 
bhng or discussion, and not even his far from typic- 
ally Mexican mind could summon up, out of his 
imagination, any phase of the subject which could 
be discussed and drawn out into long arguments. 
The Mexican mind can indeed reason most deli- 
cately and subtly, — but only upon and with the 

145 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

concrete bases which are presented in the subject 
under scrutiny. 

The inabihty of the Mexican to use his mis- 
fortunes for his own advancement is one of the 
axioms of old residents in the country. The incident 
described above, when President Diaz turned a 
virtual threat of intervention into a measure of 
pacification of the country, ranks, with a few other 
of his official acts, as almost the only historical 
adaptation of untoward circumstance to national 
good. The Mexican has long had a reputation as a 
''quitter", which is largely due to his inability, 
psychologically, to pull himself out of a hole by 
adapting the means of his misfortune to his rescue, — 
a trait whose presence or absence marks other men 
for survival or for destruction in their own native 
struggle. 

The Mexican mind, in the change from one polit- 
ical code, from one religious code, from one code 
of living to another, almost invariably follows a 
process of substitution and not of adaptation, the 
complete displacement of one set of principles by 
another set of principles, and never a turning of 
one to the service of another. In this, again, he is 
supported by savage example, for the savage is far 
more likely to adopt wholesale the practical and 
mechanical methods of the missionary or the trades- 
man than to adopt his sentiments and his philoso- 
phy, — as the long records of renegade converts and 
outraged colonies of foreigners in far-off lands 
abundantly testifies. 

One of the phases of Mexican psychology which 

146 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the foreigner finds most difficult to understand is 
this concreteness of the Mexican mind, which con- 
ceives of ideas as complete things, to be taken or 
rejected in their entirety. This goes back to a 
fundamental trait of Mexican thinking, the con- 
fusion of ideas with values, so that, as one Mexican 
has put it, they "estimate a lawyer as a humani- 
tarian, a surgeon as a biologist, a druggist as a 
chemist."^ 

This eternal weighing of what is worth while in 
each situation is to a large extent responsible for 
another peculiarity, the primacy of the sensation- 
impulse in the stimulation of the thought processes. 
Sensation, which in the average healthy animal 
begets action, and then thought, in the Mexican is 
much more hkely to be the result of thought than 
a stimulus to thought. In the presence of a possible 
sensation, the entire force of the Mexican mind is 
likely to be turned from the sensation itself to cogi- 
tation upon the escape from or the reahzation of 
the end suggested by the sensation which is felt 
or pictured as desirable. There are many reasons 
for this importance of sensation in Mexican psychol- 
ogy, and not the least is the relatively low reac- 
tion quality of the usual Mexican nervous system, 
which thus diverts suggestion from the motor nerves 
to the more ready brain cells. Data on this latter 
point has been gathered only in scattered instances, 
but it seems safe to generalize from such as is avail- 
able with the assertion that the Mexican Indian 



1 Martin Luis Guzman, "La Querella de Mexico," Madrid, 1915, 
page 14. 

147 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

has a low sense of physical pain, and that the 
Mexican in general and in all classes is not as a rule 
"quick" to respond to suggestion or to act logically 
in crisis. In other words, sensation — ^physical, 
emotional or mental — starts neither a train of action 
nor a process of deliberation; it starts, rather, an 
elaborate and complicated reasoning as to the most 
desirable and exquisite way of satisfying it if it is 
pleasant or shutting it off if it is unpleasant. 

This almost blind domination of the mental proc- 
esses by sensation impulses, and the equally sig- 
nificant enjoyment of quibbling more than accom- 
phshment, lead to a conclusion which is a starting 
point on our road to a true understanding of Mexico. 

And this is that as a people, the Mexicans have 
not yet attained to the plane of higher self-con- 
sciousness. Professor James has evaluated that 
sense of seK-reahzation in his own clear phrases: 
''our own reality, that sense of our own hfe which 
we at every moment possess, is the ultimate of ulti- 
mates of our behef." 

That glorious self-realization which is the only 
justified end of all thought and all striving seems 
indeed far distant from the virtues which the 
Mexican mind seeks. One can picture the average 
Mexican, even less than the average peasant of 
other races, looking in utter wonder at him who 
suggests such an end of life. And, unfortunately, 
we can also see, sitting in the seats of power in 
Mexico, men whose minds cannot conceive even the 
self-realization for Mexico which was dreamed by 
the elder patriots, Hidalgo, Morelos, Juarez and 

148 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Diaz. Their minds see nothing but the concrete, 
the personal; their souls dream nothing but an 
empty glory of hollow, quibbling triumph over 
some apathetic enemy. Their attention turns not 
to the realization of their own deep beliefs, that 
'^ ultimate of ultimates" which is the justification 
of thought. It flies to things ugly and minor, 
unworthy of thought or care, — the nonessentials of 
mere existence. 

The problem of Mexican regeneration on the in- 
tellectual plane resolves itself into a redirection of 
the forces of the mind, and that vital need must 
be met before Mexico can pass far along the road 
of progress. The ends to which Mexican mind-power 
is now directed make it impossible for the things 
that are really worth the doing, worthy of the praise 
of men, to rise by their own buoyancy. In the Mexi- 
can mind nonessentials do not float away into 
nothingness in the winnowing process of mere 
healthy Hving; they must be picked out one by 
one and cast away, while the wheat is saved, grain 
by grain. And such a condition calls for all the 
concentration of education and civihzation of which 
the world is capable. 



149 



CHAPTER VII 

THE "emotional" MEXICAN 

LONG acceptance of easy phrases has estabhshed 
' the tradition that the Mexican is ruled entirely 
by his emotions, that his virtues and his faults alike 
spring from the instinctive welling up of a passion- 
ate nature. It may be that an understanding of the 
origins as well as the manifestations of Mexican 
emotion will bring partial relief from the bonds of 
this tradition, and thus go far toward clarifying the 
whole uncomfortable problem which this national 
psychology has presented to us. 

The expressions of Mexican emotion are pecu- 
liarly the creations of the mental process. Even 
the emotion itself is determined by the choices of 
the mind and the conscious or instinctive direction 
of the mental powers. This is true even in the 
lower levels of Mexican life where there is apparently 
little reasoning thought. Emotion is the slave of 
intellect, the sorry handmaiden of a mind which 
filters life through twisted sieves and raises itself 
to emotional heights or plunges itself to emotional 
depths with sybaritic deliberation. The moral 
standards of the people apparently depend not a 
little on sentiment, and while the national ''ideals" 
of land distribution, isolation from foreign influence, 

150 



THE ''EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

etc., take their power from sentiraent and emotion, 
in their origins they all trace far back to intellectual 
decisions. 

Great grief, easily assuaged by philosophic con- 
templation; passionate love which devises intel- 
lectual stimulants to maintain its fervor and finds 
its highest emotional expression in the largely men- 
tal amusement of jealousy; bravado which arouses 
itself by the reiteration of the fact that it is muy 
hombre (very much a man) ; bravery which is wise 
enough to work itself up into a noble frenzy only 
when it is sure that the enemy is numerically in- 
ferior or is already retiring; anger which never 
breaks unless for studied effect or under the in- 
fluence of intoxicants, — these are Mexican emo- 
tionalism. The tender sentiments of love of off- 
spring have their roots, if you will, in pride of 
achievement; politeness is seldom unstudied; hon- 
esty is scrupulous only when it is worth while, and 
generosity overflows only when the attitude of the 
beneficiary conforms rigidly to traditional stand- 
ards of simpatia and appreciation of Mexican 
dignity. 

An emotional temperament, to be sure, is part of 
the equipment of every soul born of the mixed 
bloods of Mexico and nurtured under her tropic 
sun. But with it comes also a mind which from 
childhood trains itself in the visualizing faculty 
which calls up circumstances and ideas capable of 
creating the physical sensation which is the veritable 
emotion of that temperament. Perhaps this fac- 
ulty is imagination, but if it is, it so truly absorbs 

151 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

all the other manifestations of the quahty as to 
resolve itself into an intellectual concentration that 
has no other end. 

Modern psychologists hold that the sensation 
itself is the emotion, and that stripped of the 
physical feeling the emotion disappears. The 
function of the Mexican mind, then, is merely to 
create the feeling, the idea of the sensation, and 
then the emotion follows forthwith. Observation 
of the Mexican in his emotional states will go far to 
convince even the believer in the genuineness of 
Mexican sentiment that this is exactly what he 
deliberately seeks to accomplish. The outstanding 
example is, of course, the satisfaction of the sex 
instinct, to which the typical Mexican devotes ap- 
proximately three-fourths of his intellectual energy, 
although the lesser emotional instincts come well 
under the operation of this tremendous law. 

Primarily, the natural basis of our emotions is 
of course our instincts. And all elementary train- 
ing to the contrary notwithstanding, man, as a 
mere animal, normally has more instincts than any 
of his fellow creatures, for, as Professor James 
expresses it somewhere, ''Instinct shades into re- 
flex action below and into acquired habits or sug- 
gested activity above." But there is a relative 
paucity of higher instincts in the Mexican mind. 
The three great instincts. Lust, Anger and Fear, 
are present, but above them there are immense 
stretches of void and empty emotional life. There 
is a rudimentary sense of beauty, an appreciation 
of sonorous music, poetry and oratory and a not 

152 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

too lovely sense of humor, but we appeal in vain 
to the average Mexican for the nobler sentiments of 
true devotion and true sympathy, we seek unsuc- 
cessfully in the lower levels of his mind for a true 
sense of play, even a true curiosity or a true shyness 
such as makes a comfortable brown bear a charming 
friend. 

Of the great instincts which form the mainspring 
of Mexican life the chief est — and at the same time 
the most profound — emotion is lust, the sex 
urge. The primary instinct of all animal hfe (next 
to self-preservation), in the Mexican it transcends 
everything else. No appraisal of the Mexican 
mind is complete without an appreciation of its 
overwhelming importance, just as no appraisal of 
Mexican health and achievement is complete with- 
out an understanding of the sexual over-indul- 
gence which is the result of this intellectual pre- 
occupation. ^ 

The sex instinct, the emotion of lust, has been 
referred to just above as the outstanding ex- 
ample of the Mexican's devotion of all his intel- 
lectual forces, not merely to the gratification of 
emotional desire, but to the very creation of that 
desire. A sweeping condemnation is always unfair, 
but no people, probably, have ever devoted so 
much intellectual concentration to the ends of sex 
as the average and typical Mexican. Eroticism 
in its perverted forms is probably not overly com- 
mon, but the ''normal" sex expressions are the end 
of life for the average Mexican, particularly the 

1 Cf. "The People of Mexico," pages 380 et seq. 

153 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

average Mexican male. His mind dwells ever on 
sex, and what corresponds to his imagination is 
devoted — all of it — to sex gratifications. Where 
the sex desire in its physical expressions is not forth- 
coming with sufficient frequency to satisfy the 
intellectual idea of its pleasure, the forces of the 
mind are directed to the creation of the physical 
desire itself. A Mexican youth, spending his 
evening in the tantalizing occupation of talking 
through the stout bars of her front window to the 
girl who is to be his wife, on parting from her hies 
him quickly to the arms of his temporary mistress 
before the excitement of the hours of cooing love- 
making with his fiancee shall have worn away, — 
such bliss of desire must not be wasted. 

This phase of Mexican mentality, so studiously 
avoided in nearly all books on Mexico, yet so 
tremendous a factor in the national ineptitude of 
mind and character, is patent to all who live long 
in the country. It is recognized by the elabo- 
rate care with which the girls of the upper classes 
are protected by convent education and by careful 
chaperonage, and by the almost universal custom, 
in the same ranks of society, of sending the boys 
out of the country for education in schools in the 
United States and Europe, where more wholesome 
ideas are the rule and where the influences of 
servants and of the customs of the land have not 
the inevitable effect which they have in Mexico. 

The care of both boys and girls is frankly as a 

caution against the too early development of sexual 

interests, and although we might easily criticize 

154 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

the customs which prevent the wholesome meeting 
of boys and girls in ordinary play, which make 
healthy exercise impossible for ''properly" cul- 
tured children, and which make courtship a tan- 
talizing and overstimulating emotional debauch, we 
cannot sidestep the fact that lust is and will prob- 
ably long continue to be the chief preoccupation 
of the Mexican intellect. Nor can we fail to see, 
no matter how widely we look askance, that the 
keen and active Mexican child sails through his 
lessons and manifests the most astonishing aptitude 
for the arts or for duties of citizenship, until, when 
the age of puberty comes, he suddenly collapses 
hke a punctured balloon. From that moment on 
he flattens his whole life out into a busy search, 
first for sexual adventures and soon and forever 
after for some mental stimulus which will keep 
him spurred forward in the race for the things of 
lust. 

The byproduct of this concentration on lust is 
the virtual absence, save in the highest ranks of 
society, of what the Anglo-Saxon conceives as love. 
The whole Mexican social organization crushes the 
woman into the position of a sexual slave, and the 
companionship which makes love and marriage a 
sacrament, not only in the Anglo-Saxon lands but 
in the Latin lands of Europe as well, is as absent 
from the average Mexican home as it is from the 
Oriental. Elsewhere^ this family organization has 
been discussed with sufficient frankness, so that 
here it need be only mentioned. It seems to be the 

1 C/. "The People of Mexico," Book II, chapter v. 
155 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

result, literally, of the concentration on sex and of 
the overstimulation which keeps the mind from 
long occupation on any subject that has not lust 
or the stimulation of lust as its chief end. The 
love that might well be the revivifying element in 
torn and bleeding Mexico has thus, through the 
centuries, been sacrificed on the altars of its baser 
sisters. 

One phase only of true love persists, — the family 
instinct, an instinct shared with many of the beasts, 
to be sure, but a mighty and a hopeful factor in 
Mexico. Maternity brings love in its train, as all 
the world around, and through life the bond per- 
sists, in varying degree and with varying mani- 
festations. In the higher classes, it creates a 
powerful union, and the family is one of the great 
hopes of Mexican regeneration. In the lower 
classes, the family ties are virtually all on the 
maternal line, for wandering fathers and the lack 
of any firm system of matrimony give us only the 
material for a most primeval society with the 
mother, like the sage old she-wolf, the ruler and 
head of all. 

But of all the manifestations of the kaleidoscopic 
emotions of love and lust, jealousy is, to the out- 
sider, the most violent. It is the "terrible jealousy" 
of the Mexican male, the ''unreasoning wrath" of 
the outraged husband which stand out in the usual 
observations on Mexican love. And jealousy is, 
when all is said and done, a largely intellectual 
product. It is created by the vision of the eye and 
ear, nurtured in the hothouse of cogitation and is 

156 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

thrust forth with a more or less deUberate pur- 
pose, — the effect which its manifestations may have 
on the object of affection and upon the interloper 
within the walls. 

The manifestations of jealousy bring us inune- 
diately to the second of the great emotions, anger, 
for jealousy bears a close relationship to it. Baffled 
lust, the origin of jealousy, is closely related to all 
the causes of anger, impotence, disappointment, etc. 

Apologists for the Mexican excesses of the present 
series of revolutions find ample material in explana- 
tions that the atrocities are the result of outbreaks 
of the ''ungovernable temper" of the unhappy 
mixed breeds and Indians. But granted once more 
(as always) the emotional temperament and an 
equal lack of self-control, these outbursts are almost 
as much the result of deliberate thought as the 
planned "campaign of f rightfulness" in the Great 
War. The cause is the same, psychologically. The 
Mexican, lacking as he is in courage (although he is 
often brave, to draw an important distinction), 
conceives, consciously or subconsciously, that anger 
and atrocity will frighten his adversary, and so 
works up both with that single end in view. The 
inspiring of fear is the great idea back of virtually 
aU manifestations of Mexican anger. It is the old 
story of the hideous masks of the ancient Chinese 
warriors, worn for the purpose of frightening the 
adversary, the modern story of German atrocity, 
to cow the civilian population of invaded countries, 
to stop the onslaughts of the enemy by crucifying 

their captured fellows. 

157 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Anger under sudden provocation there is, of 
course, but such anger is essentially childlike, com- 
ing easily and passing away often without leaving 
a ripple on the surface of the mind. For even the 
great *'cholers" which are spoken of with bated 
breath are comparable to nothing in the world so 
much as a child lying on the floor and kicking in a 
burst of wild and uncontrolled temper, and they 
usually pass with no worse result than nervous 
exhaustion. 

In fear, there is less of the intellectual than in 
lust and anger. The effect of the intellectual process 
on fear is to inhibit it, and Mexican cowardice is 
thoroughly unreasoning. To begin at the very begin- 
ning of fear-expression in that disinterested cruelty 
which is so definite a trait of Mexican character, we 
find but little opportunity to account for it on an 
intellectual basis. Such cruelty belongs in the lower 
ranges of animal life, a primal instinct connected 
with the chase, with battle, and so with the deepest 
fear-instinct. 

The cruelty of Mexico, moreover, has sound 
basis in historic heritage. The human sacrifices of 
the Aztecs were a shock even to the Spaniards, but 
the conquerors' contribution to this psychological 
phase of the mixed race caused very little confusion 
in the Indian. The Spaniard was not above 
cruelty, and he did not discourage the Aztec love 
of bloodshed, although he abolished cannibalism 
and the religious forms of human sacrifice which 
were at variance with his Christian teaching. Any 
Mexican repugnance at bloodshed that there may 

158 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

be has no source in the human tendency to picture 
oneself in the suffering which is displayed, however. 
Professional assassins have always abounded, and 
the instinct for blood takes form in bullfights, cock- 
fights, and the use of the dagger. 

As to cruelty to animals, as such, there is a con- 
fusion of the emotional enjoyment of bloodshed 
with the philosophical idea that one must get the 
most for the least trouble. The slaughtering of a 
steer on a Mexican ranch is the subject of great 
interest to the entire family and one of the brutal 
traditional practices is to tie up a beef for two or 
three days without food or water before kilUng him. 
Perhaps of similar origin is the fact that the Mexican 
seldom kills an animal which breaks a leg, but rather 
leaves it to die in great suffering after many days. 
If a foreigner suggests kilhng the beast to save his 
agony, he is greeted with the assertion that the 
owner loves that animal and has not the heart to 
kill him. But if the foreigner insists in his humane 
intention and shoots the sufferer, he is, as often as 
not, required to pay for the animal in spite of the 
fact that it would have died in any case. Instances 
of cruel beatings of animals are common, and a 
peon will starve his burro, horse or cow without 
compunction. This can perhaps be explained by 
the fact that the average Mexican peon, in handling 
animals, treats them as well as he treats himself, 
because he often goes without food or eats what is 
available. The attitude of the upper-class Mexicans 
toward their animals is sometimes humane, but sel- 
dom sympathetic. The use of curb-bits and the 

159 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

fierce riding of horses, the unnecessary cruelties to 
dogs and other pets, can, at its best, be traced only 
to traditional belief that these are the proper meth- 
ods for "handling" animals to get "service" and 
proper homage. 

The bullfight may perhaps be accounted for 
equally well as a race heritage from the days when 
the hunting of fierce beasts was a vital factor in 
savage life, as on the ground of disinterested cruelty. 
Indeed, the entertainment and the exhibition of the 
skillful art of the matador may be given by a Mexi- 
can as reason enough for a bullfight, but it does not 
account for the prevalence of cruelty in the great 
national sports of cockfighting and buUbaiting as 
well. We must still admit disinterested cruelty as 
one of tne most significant branches of the great 
emotional family of fear. 

Above the plane of cruelty, however, fear takes 
on other significant secondary forms. If the evolu- 
tion of man from the brute and from the savage is 
marked, as it is marked, by a steadily lessening 
frequency of the occasions for unreasoning fear, then 
in the Mexican the advance has reached a stage 
where fear is still powerful but has taken on special 
forms of expression. 

Perhaps the lowest of these is that suspicion which 
is so dominating a mental trait in the Indians of 
Mexico and so direct a result of the isolation in 
which the people five. In the interior villages and 
Indian settlements, as has been noted, the stranger 
is always regarded as a potential enemy, and the 
fear and suspicion are also developed, by such men- 

160 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

tal processes as are used, into an elaborate system 
of feuds with neighboring villages, — traits, both of 
them, of the unthinking savage the world around. 
In the shghtly higher grades of Mexican life, fear 
takes yet another form in the cunning which shapes 
so much of the hfe of the lower middle classes, the 
eternal effort to find an advantage which will over- 
come a real or supposed superiority in their feUows 
or in the foreigner. 

Fear is almost the only motive recognized in the 
Mexican mind for the impulses of kindliness, sym- 
pathy and consideration which are offered to Mexi- 
can individuals or groups by the simple foreigner. 
Kindness, even politeness, in a foreigner is accepted 
by the mass of Mexicans as a sign of weakness, a 
manifestation of fear. The astonishing responses 
which are made, in diplomacy as in private life, to 
generous advances, have their origin in this one 
conviction, — that courtesy and consideration come 
only from fear of the object thereof. 

A thoroughly typical example of this attitude is 
found in the story of an American who, hearing that 
a Mexican woman servant whom he had once em- 
ployed was anxious to possess, a gold wrist watch, 
sent one to her from New York. His acknowledg- 
ment was from the woman's new employer, who 
reported that she had accepted the gift, but had 
announced that it had been sent her because her 
former employer feared her, because she knew so 
much of his affairs! 

The story will strike an answering chord in the 
experience of all who have had contact with 

161 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Mexicans. In many cases the condition is amusing, 
as here; in others, it is the source of personal trag- 
edy, business difficulties, or, what is more far- 
reaching, serious diplomatic complications. It is 
doubtful if Americans will hve down, in less time 
than a generation, the effect on the Mexican mind 
of the conciliatory tactics pursued by President 
Wilson toward the Carranza government. No 
Mexican official then or now believes that there 
was any other motive for Mr. Wilson's patience 
than a fear of the harm Carranza could do the 
United States, either by invasion (actually!) or by 
openly espousing the German cause in the war. 
And no Anglo-Saxon needs to be a partisan to know 
that whatever the blunders of the Wilson policy 
toward Mexico may have been, they were dictated 
by an over-anxiety to ''give Carranza a chance." 
It is the tragedy of that poHcy that it failed so 
utterly to grasp the merest fundamentals of Mexi- 
can psychology. 

Of the remaining human instincts, perhaps the 
conditions surrounding curiosity in the Mexican 
are the most significant and illuminating. For 
curiosity, as such, is not one of the outstanding 
characteristics of the Indian or of the mixed breed. 
His eye seldom sparkles with interest and seldom 
does one find that spirit of wonder which is the 
beginning of imagination and, indeed, of education 
and uphft. Apathy, so prominent a characteristic 
of the whole Mexican people, has its beginnings in 
this lack of curiosity. Back of apathy are also ill- 
health (a national ill health), an abuse of stimulants, 

162 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

and other physical causes, and in addition it has 
even a social source. The fatalism which has killed 
curiosity and made apathy a national characteristic 
in Mexico has been nurtured by the centuries upon 
centuries when no choice has ever been required of 
the mass of Mexicans. Aztec emperors, Spanish 
governors, republican politicians, have asked and 
wanted none of it, and never, even in the late years 
of radical socialism in Mexico, has there been any 
true awakening of the masses to curiosity, to delib- 
erative choice, to an impersonal interest in the world 
in which they Uve. 

Shyness normally has similar origins with curi- 
osity and is based in the terror of the unknown. 
In the Mexican this very elimination of choice, the 
very providing of a dull round of monotonous life 
which has been his portion through the ages, has 
ehminated much of the instinct of shyness which is 
characteristic of savage peoples; only in childhood 
and under conditions of servility does it really 
manifest. On the other hand, secretiveness, an in- 
stinct which is actually an intellectual phase of 
primitive shyness, is developed beyond all bounds 
in the Mexican; he turns, again, to the mental as 
opposed to the instinctive. His secretiveness is 
part, indeed, of that true or false consciousness of 
inferiority which is one of the motivating agents of 
the Mexican attitude toward the outside world. 

Acquisitiveness, traceable to envy and to jeal- 
ousy, is an instinct which is bound up with the 
qualities of honesty and dishonesty, but it is un- 
Hkely that the true manifestations of it as an instinct 

163 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

are really to be found in the Mexican nature. It, 
again, appears chiefly as the result of conscious or 
subconscious thought directed by or directing the 
desires of the mind and body. 

Honesty is an instinct whose presence or absence 
in Mexican character has been the text for endless 
discussions. Superficial observers who have come in 
contact chiefly with the lower classes are very likely 
to find that the Mexican is without honor and with- 
out any sense of honesty. On the other hand, 
those tactful persons who have had large business 
dealings with the highest type of Mexicans discover 
that they are almost invariably honest and honor- 
able. Such people usually recognize the differing 
code of honor and realize that petty thefts in 
justice should not come under discussion of honesty 
in a land where centuries of feudal organization 
have drilled into the mind of the people the idea 
that there were certain perquisites which belong to 
the common man, even though law may hold them 
the property of his master. It is very probable that 
most of the dishonesty in Mexico can be traced, 
also, to a sense of values, and that honesty is 
present when it is worth while and absent when it 
seems unimportant. In large matters the Mexican 
is usually worthy of a high degree of trust, but in 
small matters the peon, at least, is a natural pil- 
ferer. A special phase of the question of honesty 
comes up in the fact that a Mexican does not, as a 
rule, trust his own people as much as he will trust 
a foreigner who is trained in a more rigid school of 
ethics. This last point is probably its own explana- 

164 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

tion and a reflection on Mexican moral training. 
The code of honor of upper-class Mexicans is high, 
although easily diverted by the self-delusion to 
which the race is prone. Old residents find that the 
trusted servant in Mexico is the honest servant, 
but they have, of course, learned how to arouse his 
sense of honor. 

Property rights are comphcated by the inherit- 
ance of the Indian communal idea. The peon's 
right to steal ore from the mine in which he works, 
flour from the sacks which he is transporting, are 
never questioned in the offender's mind, and the idea 
of humanity's equal ownership of all the fruits of 
the soil crops up again and again. Another phase 
is shown in the story of a rancher, who, having 
borrowed a boiler and kept it two years, sold it 
because he had had it so long that he considered it 
his own. A similar case is that of another small 
farmer who borrowed a wheelbarrow and consid- 
ered it an act of injustice when he was asked to 
return it after a year. 

The moral instinct of the Mexican is one of the 
complicated phases of his psychology, for it again is 
tied up with race, with climate and with food. The 
influence of the Church in Mexico was exerted, at 
least in the early days, along mystical lines, and, 
save for education in theology, the practical prob- 
lems of ethics were touched only in their relation 
to the future life and very little in their relation to 
the present. As a result the early Mexican, with 
his heritage of Indian mysticism and Spanish theol- 
ogy, built up a fabric of moral customs which are, 

165 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

to his descendants, more important than any mere 
moral principles. To a lesser extent this is true 
throughout Mexican social life, and the traditions 
of the classes have set their moral standards. These 
may be explained briefly as a distinction between 
immorality and unmorality. The Mexican may be 
said to be unmoral as judged by current European 
and American standards. Right and wrong, par- 
ticularly in the relationship of men and women, 
has little place in his philosophy, and pure ethics 
is a phase of philosophy which influences few 
Mexican processes of thought. 

If the instinct for morality is somewhat atrophied 
into an intellectual weighing of what is worth the 
effort of righteousness, the instinct for play is a 
hardly more beautiful development. Years ago, 
when the writer first went to Mexico, his series of 
articles in a Mexico City newspaper^ set down 
his early impressions with a frankness which greater 
knowledge might have inhibited. Through those 
impressions, thus recorded, ran a continuous ex- 
pression of surprise over the brooding melancholy 
of the people, over the utter absence of that spirit 
of play which makes a crowd, in New York or Lon- 
don or Paris, especially at festival time, a good- 
natured, sociable, if aimless mass of natural friends. 
It simply was not present in the Mexican crowd, and 
because it was not, a sense of melancholy seemed 
omnipresent. On one occasion, the article discussed 
the appearance of the Mexican group at a festival 

1 "Notes of a Newcomer," The Mexican Herald, December, 
1904, and January, 1905. 

166 



THE ''EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

time which, under briUiant fireworks and in the 
bahny winter night of Mexico City, was absorbing 
the music and the parades devised by the wise 
old dictator, Diaz, for the amusement of his people. 
The picture was depressing. The editor of the paper 
commented that it had its merits of truth, but that 
as acquaintance broadened, the realization would 
come that the peons had their ''little jokes just 
like other people." That broader acquaintance has 
come and with it the realization that there are 
jokes and a true and subtle humor; that the emo- 
tional crowd is played upon by music and by oratory 
and by poetry; and that it enjoys its festivals and 
dances. But with that broadening knowledge there 
has never come a feeling that the sense of play, 
the spirit which makes life livable and worth all 
it costs of pain and sorrow, — that this sense of play 
is an instinct in any Mexican. 

It is not impossible that this absence is responsi- 
ble ahke for the great emotional influence of oratory 
and poetry and for the particular types of humor 
which are characteristic of the Mexican. The 
Mexican in action never "has a picture of himself" 
as the Anglo-Saxon phrases it. He never sees the 
incongruous side of the figure which he cuts, a 
trait which is vital to any one who would, for ex- 
ample, compose and recite a ponderous ode on the 
occasion of the inauguration of a new public laun- 
dry in an Indian village. Nor has he the self-con- 
sciousness which will prevent his responding with 
tense and appreciative emotion to the stirrings of 

such a poem or to the stately phrases of an elaborate 

167 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

oration. It is hardly for the Saxon to say that his 
own utter self-consciousness, his own clear picture 
of himself in every situation is the better part; 
suffice it that the Mexican is different, and that as 
a result he hears and thrills to poems, odes and ora- 
tions with a simplicity and genuineness that go far to 
justify the authors and the speakers of such efforts. 

This instinct for the beautiful, shall we say, runs 
through the entire gamut of Mexican life. In music, 
improvisations are the accepted test of skill, and 
even in the fields with the peons, he who can impro- 
vise words and music is not only rewarded with 
honest appreciation but is a type to be found in 
almost every group. 

Moreover, the instinct for oratory and dialectic 
is almost universal. Peons will argue with high- 
sounding phrases and voices ringing with sentiment 
upon the most trivial situations based upon the 
weakest of premises. Of late years the formerly 
forbidden field of politics has opened to give new 
impetus both to oratory and debate, and where, 
before, the Mexican could argue of nothing but 
his individual wrongs, the gossip of his neighbors 
and the behavior of his sons, even the peon can 
now make great strophes of his new conceptions of 
socialism and the rights of man. To this the 
Mexican now devotes much energy and a vast 
amount of rhetoric. Almost any Mexican, when he 
is trained intellectually, is a fiery orator and debater, 
skilful in repartee and perfectly capable of holding 
his own in any argument. As a people the Mexicans 
respond distinctly to the power of eloquence, often 

168 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

a very charming eloquence. The lower classes are 
swayed hither and yon by skilful speakers, and any 
orator is sure of an audience, even though it be 
the same audience which cheered as loudly for his 
rival a few moments before. 

Mexican humor seems closely related to this 
same instinct of appreciation, of emotional re- 
sponse. There is little of the heavy chaffing typical 
of Anglo-Saxon wit, and the two outstanding types 
of the hghter emotion are ridicule and punning. 
The latter, the universal form of wit the world 
around, takes a special form in Mexico, where, for 
example, the shift of well-known pubhc scandals to 
personal situations is universal, even down to the 
classes where one would ordinarily never seek it. 
It has been said that most humor is based on 
suffering or discomfort, and this is indeed true in 
Mexico, where there seems ever to be mingled a 
touch of cruelty. 

The easy response of the Mexican mind to the 
particular form of humor which is contained in 
ridicule is so prompt and goes so deep that such a 
jest immediately turns the most serious matters 
into jokes, and the recovery from such a joke to the 
plane of serious consideration is literally impos- 
sible. Such a condition is of course not the peculiar 
property of Mexico, but there the joke need hardly 
be even good in order to work havoc; the only 
requirement seems to be that laughter come. A 
spark of wit in the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico 
City has been sufficient at times, even though it 
were but an awkward jest, to ruin the most impor- 

169 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

tant business. A facetious saying passing from 
one to another has been known to upset an entire 
government pohcy, and a humorous epithet at- 
tached to a government official has more than once 
brought him to absolute downfall. 

An instance of the latter was the dubbing of 
Gustavo Madero, brother of the president, as '^Ojo 
Par ado,'' a conmient on his glass eye. This cir- 
cumstance actually had much to do with bringing 
him into contempt and ridicule, for the reports of his 
alleged profiteering in public works (the equivalent 
for which in Spanish is ^'Obras PiMicas") were 
stamped indelibly upon him by referring to him as 
''0. P.", the initials of both ''Ohras PuUicas'' and 
''Ojo ParadoJ' 

A wit in Mexico City named the cabinet selected 
by Limantour in the closing days of the Diaz 
regime (March, 1911) "El Gahinete del Do de 
Pecho", the implication being that the cabinet was 
destined to last about as long as one can hold on to 
high C, a subtlety which had the prompt and com- 
plete triumph of a prophecy. 

The occupation of Mexico City by troops under 
General (later President) Obregon in 1915 witnessed 
many excesses and much suffering, but some wag 
wrote an anagram on the name of Alvaro Obregon, 
forming with the letters the words " Vengo a roharlo " 
("I come to rob"). Persons living in Mexico City 
at the time report that this witticism, which cir- 
culated throughout the city with the rapidity of 
a wireless, considerably lessened the tension of bit- 
ter feeling engendered by the abuses of the soldiery, 

170 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

which were taken thereafter, as one would say in 
Spanish, entnely "de guasa" (as a joke). 

Another incident is indicative of the tj^e of this 
grmi humor. After the flight of provisional Presi- 
dent Carbajal (August 3, 1914), the capital awoke 
one morning to find written in chalk in large letters 
on the door of the National Palace: "Se alquila. 
Para informes, dirigirse a la Casa Blanca, Washing- 
ington, D. C. ("For rent. Apply to the White 
House, Washington, D. C"). 

There is indeed true humor and a great deal of it 
in the Mexicans, although it is accented by but 
little levity, and is more often childlike and wan- 
tonly cruel. An instance is the ridicule in which 
the schoolmaster is held in Mexico. This great 
public spirit is always pictured and discussed as the 
comic dominie of the Spanish farce, an attitude 
most distasteful to the teachers, for it is combined 
with a humorous patronage which wonders ''why 
the poor fellow doesn't become a street-car con- 
ductor so that he may get a living wage." 

So common and so unlovely indeed is the humor 
of the lower classes that in answer to a newspaper's 
question as to ''What is the most pernicious habit 
of the Mexican people?" one correspondent replied: 

In my opinion, it is the making of jokes, whether they fit 
the ease or not. ... A law is made, and the next day a facetious 
saying goes from mouth to mouth; should there be an epi- 
demic, instantly it receives a name which awakens the hilarity 
of the pubhc. . . . This custom, which is even more general 
among men and women of the lower classes, perhaps shows 
that the race is not devoid of wit, but it also means that it 

171 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

lacks seriousness and courteousness. Perpetual joking is a 
symptom of incurable frivolity, and there is nothing worse 
than a frivolous people." 

Throughout the humor of the Mexican lower 
classes runs a note of blasphemy and frivolity 
which doubtless suggested the protest quoted above. 
The vilest stories in Mexico are tied to the saints 
and priests of the Church, and the appreciation of 
a joke is greatly increased if it is hopelessly blas- 
phemous. Indeed, one who passes along the streets 
of the City of Mexico has proof enough of this in 
the names given the dirty pulque shops, which 
sentimentalists attribute to misguided religious 
feeling, but which the Mexican resident knows 
were the result of a diabolical humor. ''El Retiro 
de Juan Bautista" (The Retreat of John the 
Baptist); ''El Retiro de la Santa Virgen" (The 
Retreat of the Holy Virgin); "El Septimo Cielo" 
(The Seventh Heaven); "The Devil's Triumph"; 
"The Trail of the Red Devil"; "The Embrace, of 
St. Helen," to go no further, are proof enough of a 
Satanic humor which may well be discussed sol- 
emnly in "letters to the newspapers." 

The perpetual joking of the Mexican is empha- 
sized in the upper classes as well as in the lower, 
and General Diaz himself was not above a grim or 
clever sally. One such tale is worth repeating here. 

It is no secret that the revolutionary movement 
of November, 1910, was nipped in the bud only by 
the prompt action of the Diaz forces. Many 
papers fell into the hands of the government agents 
at the time, and among them was a carefully 

172 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

worked-out plan to seize Mexico City from The 
Hill of the Star, in a near-by suburb. The Minister 
of War at the time (General Gonzalez Cosio) one 
day found President Diaz engaged in studying 
these plans. To flatter his chief, General Gonzalez 
Cosio said to him: 

"Mr. President, those are not plans; they are 
nothing." 

"No, they are not plans," General Diaz replied. 
"If you order a pair of trousers and they are 
promised for Saturday and you go on Thursday, 
you will find only two great pieces of cloth which 
look more like skirts. But if you go on Saturday 
you will see that they will fit your legs very well. 
You are right. These are not plans, because we 
arrived on Thursday." 

In the shadowy field where emotion merges into 
will hes habit, one of the important psychological 
elements of all life. Habit is largely emotional 
in its origin and looks to will for its direction. In 
the Mexican mind, then, habit holds important 
place, and perhaps the most illuminating explana- 
tion of the chaos of Mexican feeling and the un- 
certainties of Mexican will is the utter disturbance 
of racial habit which was forced upon the Mexican 
Indian types for the three hundred years of Spanish 
domination. It seems safe to state that in this 
matter of habit-forming the Mexicans have an 
important quality which gives real promise of an 
opening for advancement, a balance against the 
vast weight of tradition. Professor Wallas holds 

that the habit-forming trait varies tremendously 

173 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

with race, quoting Aristotle, who reported the 
astonishment of the Greeks (who had Httle of the 
trait) at the abiUty of the "Kelts" to become 
accustomed to and indifferent to danger.^ He 
goes on to say that ''it is no mere accident that the 
Great Society has been developed with most suc- 
cess amongst the North European races whose 
powers of blind habituation excited the contempt 
of the Greeks." 

Thus it may well be that the blind conservatism 
of the Mexicans, while it is to-day apparently a 
stumblingblock to progress, has in it the inertia 
which will make for advancement and great changes 
in character under proper direction and understand- 
ing education. Habit, if unnatural, is easily upset 
by crisis (as witness the present upheaval of Mexi- 
can life and the rush back to the lower phases of 
Indianism), owing to the failure of education really 
to appreciate and to work with the human elements 
of education. But in the new education which 
must come to Mexico, the work will be along the 
Unes of natural development of the race, through 
its own habits and emotions and predilections. The 
vast changes to progress and enlightenment will 
come surely, because they will be along paths well 
trod in the race mind of the centuries long before 
the dream of white domination. 

Until now, the life of Mexico has been only one 
long history of the grafting of foreign customs and 
foreign habits upon the mind and soul of the coun- 
try. It takes a far more callous mind than seeks, 

1 Graham WaUas, "The Great Society," New York, 1913, page 72. 
174 



THE "EMOTIONAL" MEXICAN 

in this writing, the solution of Mexico's problems 
to see only wretched degeneracy in the present 
Mexican crisis. Rather the troubles of to-day, like 
ihe troubles of the white man in many other lands, 
are the result of his faulty systems of education 
which have tried to change habits by wrenching 
them loose, when the very strength of the habits 
should have been the greatest encouragement for 
their adaptation to form new habits. Neither the 
Mexican of old time, the Indian of to-day nor the 
mixed-blood of to-day is to be punished or anathema- 
tized. Nor, more than all, are the Spaniard who has 
taught him and the Anglo-Saxon who can teach- 
him now to be ruled out for their failure. 

The crisis of Mexico is but part of the crisis of our 
civihzation, and we have no right to condemn either 
the pupil who failed or the teacher who has been 
unsuccessful. Both must try again and learn anew, 
for the white man is still the greatest of the world's 
teachers, and with his new understanding and his 
new seeking of adjustment instead of destruction, 
he will carry the mixed-blood and the Indian of 
Mexico forward surely — and indeed not slowly — to 
the formation of his new civilization. 

Again the reference is to the important work 
of Manuel Gamio, quoted above, and the repeti- 
tion of a phrase which tells a truth vaster than the 
truth about Mexico alone: "We cannot Eu- 
ropeanize the Indian at one stroke; we had rather 
Indianize ourselves a little to assist in the rap- 
prochement." ^ 

1 Manuel Gamio, "Forjando Patria," Mexico City, 1916, page 40. 

175 



CHAPTER VIII 

WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

THE fundamental elements of Mexican decision 
have come down through tradition and racial 
heritage; they were settled long before the indi- 
vidual who ^' makes " them was born. Beyond those 
fixed elements, however, the normal Mexican will 
is the slave of the intellectual decisions as to what 
is worth while. Only under the influence of intoxi- 
cants, or abnormality, does it forget that beacon of 
decision which rules in its outer life as well as in 
the inner world of emotion. 

Stubborn against force, docile under persuasion, 
only an appeal to the mind seems able to move the 
Mexican to his choices. And the decision once 
made, there is perhaps no people, certainly no 
primitive people, more tenacious. Interest indeed 
may lag, apathy may take control, and an Indian 
who plants a crop with care may forget it before 
the harvest, but as a rule, only an appeal to the 
conscious choice of the mind can divert the will 
from its inevitable road to accomplishment. 

On the other hand, decision is usually astonish- 
ingly prompt, and there is seldom any complaint 

of a Mexican's failure to make up his mind. The 

176 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

Mexican will is far from feeble, and the difficulty 
with it is rather in the doggedness with which it 
cliQgs to its choices, refusing to be pried loose from 
them. Instances of astonishing — almost super- 
human — persistence are common. A trustworthy 
American archaeologist tells of an old Indian woman 
in a Oaxaca village who, out of spite or disappoint- 
ment, announced that she was going to die, — and 
die she did, in three days. A servant in an Amer- 
ican household in Mexico City had her tiny savings 
stolen from her and, in chagrin and grief, took to 
her bed and died within a week. 

Theoretically, the persistence of savage peoples 
is due to the relatively minor importance of their 
natural inhibitions; once we get beyond tradition 
and taboo, the primitive mind is usually easily 
dominated. But in the Mexican there is a rela- 
tively unique factor. There are many powerful 
inhibitions, and yet they and all else are swept 
aside, once the Mexican considers that anything is 
worth the doing, and he has the energy, the time 
and the application to achieve it. Once those 
forces of decision have been directed into one chan- 
nel, it takes more than mere authority to turn 
them to other directions. One elderly peon on a 
foreign plantation whose duty, for years, had been 
the driving of burros loaded with water casks to 
and from the river, achieved himself an invention, 
and no orders — there was no good argument against 
it — could divert him. Instead of doing the obvious 
thing and unloading the casks, filling them and 

then reloading the heavy weights, he led his train 

177 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

of burros, casks and all, into the river and waited 
patiently in water up to his neck until the stream 
filled the casks of its own will. As the question of 
dirt and wet and time did not enter into his deci- 
sion, he was doing a thoroughly intelligent thing; 
to him it was worth while. 

The direction of attention to any end is, perforce, 
the result of a decision that the end is worthy, so 
when the peon decides that it is desirable to accom- 
plish a minor theft, the details of it will occupy his 
entire intellectual process for days, no matter how 
small the guerdon or how great the risk; his choice 
has been made, and to it he brings every force at 
his Hmited command. 

Employers of Mexican labor are continually tell- 
ing of the tremendous change which comes over a 
gang of workmen when they are put on a system of 
payment by which a definite task is set as a day's 
work, and the worker either sent home when the 
task is done, or allowed to begin another; often 
two ''days' work" is done in a single shift of ten 
to twelve hours. Again, here is something worth 
while, something the peons can comprehend and 
from the comprehension direct their wills to accom- 
plishing. 

The decisions which make such actions as this 
possible are achieved against the inertia of the 
greatest of all Mexican inhibitions, apathy. Native 
it seems to be, just as tradition and fatalism, the 
other two great inhibitory elements, undoubtedly 
are. But there are two direct causes of Mexican 

apathy. Only one can be blamed on inheritance. 

178 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

The lack of vigor, due to climate, undernourish- 
ment and the abuse of stimulants, has combined 
with the fatalism induced by long oppression and 
long freedom from any important choice to shut 
out almost every spur to achievement. Thus, 
in the minds of millions of Mexicans to-day there 
is no connection between the good things of life 
and the effort which has to be put forward to 
obtain them. They have actually never been taught 
that industry is profitable. The centuries of 
virtual slavery, the ancient customs of giving 
food and housing as part of the wage and selling 
everything else on credit at the hacienda or mine 
store, drove into their simple minds the convic- 
tion that the pleasures of life came at the dis- 
cretion of the employer or of the Spanish clerk 
at the store. 

Here again we go back to the false valuations of 
the ways of life, even of what is worth while, to the 
weight of the peon's fatalism, to the slavery that 
first taught him that he need not actually work to 
five and that if he worked too hard he gained 
nothing for his pains. ^'Patience and shuffle the 
cards" is the maxim of all Mexicans who find the 
tide of affairs going against them. There is noth- 
ing to do but to go ahead, and nothing is gained 
by going too fast. "Quien sahef[' is an entire 
philosophy, for this phrase means far more than a 
mere question of ''Who knows?" Rather, it says 
that nothing matters, for what will be, will be, 
despite all human endeavor. 

Beyond such fatalism, however, there is another 

179 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

deep cause for the Mexican apathy which to-day 
still blocks the Mexican will in its higher manifes- 
tations. This is the deficiency in education in the 
responsibihties and opportunities of Ufe, the failure 
to replace Indian tradition and its stubborn clinging 
to old standards by a deep national realization of 
the vital connection between the thing achieved and 
the effort expended. The desire to "get things 
done" which spurs the Anglo-Saxon is missing, 
and the Mexicans, from peon to professional man, 
conduct their affairs according to their own con- 
ception of the maxim of Marcus Aurelius, — that 
one should live as though one were to die to-morrow, 
and work as though one were going to Hve a 
thousand years. 

The educational problem of which apathy is the 
index is to reach the Mexican's conceptions of 
what is worth the doing and to inspire him to a 
higher usefulness thoroughly compatible with such 
powers of intellect as he is endowed with. This 
chance has never been given him in all Mexican 
history. Matias Romero, long Mexican minister 
to Washington, wrote of the Colonial period: "The 
Spaniards did not educate the peons or attempt to 
elevate them; neither did they try to elevate them- 
selves. The whole of Mexico was plunged into 
apathy, but it was an apathy of supreme indiffer- 
ence, not of despair," 

The phases of seK-control and indulgence hnk 
the question of apathy to the domination of intellect 
in the choice of will. In the cradle Mexican babies 
are famously "good", and in battle Mexican soldiers 

180 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

die with utter calm, — here are factors of "self- 
control" which are surely manifestations of the 
''apathy of supreme indifference." But in the 
adult, and particularly the more or less intelligent 
adult, the appearance of lack of control is the very 
antithesis of indulgence, or else only superficial. 
Anyone who knows Mexicans has seen the flush 
of anger come into the face and fade away to an 
almost Oriental repression unless, indeed, the ex- 
pression of the anger seemed worth while. Only 
under the influence of intoxicants or narcotics, 
or after the passions have been deliberately aroused, 
is the Mexican really uncontrolled. The famous 
cholers of anger which are spoken of in solemn 
awe by those who have witnessed the exhibition 
are as noted above usually indulged in only in the 
presence of an appreciative audience. The Mexican 
philosophy does not place a very high valuation 
on the control of what he calls natural impulses, 
but if he gives them sway, for instance in a deed of 
violence, it can be taken for granted that he has 
convinced himself, by whatever process he may 
have used, that the thing was worth the doing and 
worth the risk. 

So it is with the less vital inhibitions of modesty, 
pride, honor, etc., and with the control of those 
forces of emotion which tend ever to stampede the 
will just as the inhibitions tend ever to check it. 
All seem to fall ultimately under the control of the 
intellectual decisions which make the great choices 
in all men, but in peculiar fashion dominate the 
choices of the Mexican. 

181 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

The science of psychology^ finds that there are 
five types of normal decision in the human mind: 
first the reasonable, in which we shift and rearrange 
the elements of the situation until we find a satisfy- 
ing action which squares with the various precepts 
of our life and with our belief in the needs of the 
situation; second, a drifting decision, determined 
by the circumstances surrounding both ourselves 
and the situation which we consider, — a decision 
usually made before all the evidence is considered; 
third, the sudden choice from within, due to intui- 
tion, emotion or faith, of "forward though the 
heavens fall", as James puts it; fourth, the deci- 
sion that comes from a sudden change of heart, the 
result of sudden experiences or intuition, which 
takes on the importance of a change in our char- 
acter, almost; fifth, the feeling that the evidence 
is all in, the careful balancing of all the elements 
and the final decision by a "heave of the will." 
The first four decisions reject utterly the alternative 
choice, but the fifth does not forget; it knows the 
loss that has been suffered in the elimination of the 
alternative choice. 

It is seldom, if ever, that the Mexican mind 
makes its decisions in the first and fifth ways; the 
slow process of reasoning almost never occupies 
the Latin-American mind. Most of his relatively 
few normal decisions are the result of his drifting 
choice of ends that square with his ideas of what is 
worth doing, — the second type of choice. The 

^ Cf. William James, "Principles of Psychology," New York, 
1913, pages 531 et seq. 

182 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

diift to a decision may, in the Mexican, also be a 
drift to apathy and indecision and save under 
emotional or alcoholic stress, the third form of 
choice, to go forward in spite of everything, never 
appears upon his horizon. The "change of heart" 
form of decision is also rare, in the form of an 
inward change of character, but when shaped by 
exterior events, it is often the method of deciding 
the most momentous issues, the result of that sus- 
tained pressure from without which is utterly 
maddening to minds of the Mexican type. 

Thus he who would obtain from the Mexican a 
decision prompt and satisfying appeals above all 
things to the mental process. Squaring a situation 
with the known facts of Mexican tradition, with the 
moral standards, with the selfish wishes, with the 
prejudices which may take the form of apathy and 
with those overwhelming values which the Mexican 
so astonishingly puts upon such abstractions as 
dignity and his own peculiar code of honor, — the 
taking of such pains assures a prompt and almost 
unconscious decision in the Mexican. But may 
the gods help him who would force the healthy 
Mexican mind to a decision which fails to square 
with that tremendous force of tradition which 
dominates its every act, or (in the upper classes) 
with those peculiar adaptations of European cul- 
ture which have been worked into the intellectual 
heritage of the land. 

But the Mexican will is not always the healthy, 
dependable sort of mental process just described. 
Too often the values are distorted and the vision 

183 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

deflected, and more often still action follows the 
suggestion with a rapidity which is understandable 
in the unschooled mind but which is nevertheless 
far from reassuring. Very often there is that form 
of decision called the "obstructed will", when but 
the one idea, the traditional idea usually, gets on the 
track and cannot be diverted by any power under 
the skies, neither argument, the offer of other in- 
ducements nor force itself. Indeed, the dominance 
of tradition and custom in the Mexican mind often 
takes on the form of the true obstructed will in 
other types of mentality. 

Amongst the other types of will, what Professor 
James calls the ''explosive will" is found in that 
type of the Mexican mind which differs from the 
apathetic norm. Here is the daredevil, the "mer- 
curic temperament", where inhibition is lost or was 
never heard of. And here is to be found the break 
in understanding of the minds of Latin and Saxon, — 
for this type of will comes from the Spanish side 
and not from the stolid, suspicious Indian. James 
explains it, "Monkeys these seem to us, whilst we 
seem to them reptilian." This type of decision 
then, seems to indicate a differing process of 
thought, a different mode of reaching a con- 
clusion, but in this Professor James, in one of 
his illuminating generalities, gives us a clue to 
the better understanding of the Mexican, for he 
says: 

It is the absence of scruples, of consequences, of considera- 
tions, the extraordinary simplification of each moment's out- 
look, that gives the explosive will its motor energy and ease; 

184 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

it need not be the greater intensity of his passions, motives, or 
thoughts.^ 

The simplification of outlook, the elimination of 
scruples and consequences, — these clarify and mark 
the Mexican mind when it achieves that choice 
which is called the ''explosive will." 

Will is in its last analysis the link between the 
mind and the realization of the ideas of the mind, 
and the basis of our study of the Mexican will is 
therefore the concrete phases of its manifestations. 
Is it pleasure, or the thought of discomfort which 
motivates the Mexican's choices? Is it a strong 
moral sense, a belief in some tremendous right and 
wrong, which colors those choices? Or is it that 
the Mexican mind-process is consciously directed 
to shutting out the inhibition of high moral purpose, 
so that sloth and passion may have their way? 
Those are questions which we must now seek to 
answer, but this we do know, — that the actuating 
force, if not the force which originated the impulse, 
is the effort of attention, the direction of the in- 
terest which goes back through all the countless 
generations of racial development. 

We can no more control or reshape the primary 
qualities of that interest than we can change the 
color of our skin, and only through long education 
(which the Mexicans as a people have never had) 
can it be turned ever so slightly from its momentous 
course. It is upon the strength of the idea thus 
directed, upon the momentum which it brings to 
the mind, that virtually every human decision rests. 

^ James, op cit., page 538. 

185 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Thus the discovery, the unravehng of the skeins 
of Mexican desires, of Mexican psychological values, 
holds out the greater promise of understanding than 
any abstract analysis, — no matter how important 
that analysis may have been as the basis for our 
understanding. 

The minds of men differ far more in their decisions 
(of what is worth while) than in the mere processes 
of their thoughts. The things we value are the re- 
sults and the finger-posts of our race, traditions and 
environment. It is in the appreciation of the values 
that the Mexican puts upon life and its accom- 
paniments that we fail most in understanding him. 

Even Mexicans progressed beyond the limita- 
tions of their race fall down continually in their 
estimates of the psychology of the masses of their 
own people. They urge a study of the thought 
processes of the Indian at the same time that they 
endeavor to crowd his desires into models built for 
him by the Spanish conquerors. They speak of 
the need of ''creating an indigenous soul", while 
they refuse to consider the fundamental facts of 
things desired which are the truest index of that 
soul. 

The apparent inconsistencies in Mexican psy- 
chology are always to be explained primarily by the 
difference in and the struggle between the two races 
and cultures which have so long endeavored to 
merge themselves there. In preceding chapters we 
have found these differences and confusions of race 
and class inheritance, of environment and tradi- 
tions, and noted their coloring of Mexican life and 

186 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

their determining of the methods of thought of the 
Mexican mind to-day. 

Here we seek to find the significant expressions 
of that mind, to set apart the desires whose realiza- 
tion it seeks. First, of course, are the creature com- 
forts. The wants of the Mexican are comparatively 
few as compared with those of persons of his class 
in other lands. The peon's food is limited and cheap, 
but because he hves so near the line of pauperism, 
its need is a tremendous force in his hfe. His desire 
is less intense for shelter, for that is easily satisfied, 
because there is no severely cold weather, and no 
great protection is required, but taking the ques- 
tion of food and shelter as one, we find them most 
definite determinants of Mexican conditions. When 
food gives out, the peon of the present revolutionary 
era promptly takes a rifle on his shoulder to go 
out to war and plunder. This is partially due to 
pohtical conditions which make readjustment diffi- 
cult, but it also is indicative of the utter primacy of 
food. The American or English workman or farmer, 
with his job gone or crop a failure, will go out to 
seek new work, because to him there are higher 
needs than food alone, but the Mexican becomes 
a bandit almost immediately upon the loss of his 
means of sustenance, without looking further, — 
provided, of course, that conditions of banditry 
exist. Moreover, he is very likely to join the very 
bandit leader who ruined him, for that bandit he 
knows is successful. This attitude is distinctly that 
of the untrained individual and the backward civili- 
zation, for the almost mad search for food is com- 

187 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

parable only to the savage or the beast. As a 
Mexican, Maqueo Castellanos, has put it, "Order 
depends more on whether there is corn than on 
whether there is authority. He who has nothing to 
defend and is hungry develops into a mercenary for 
any cause, at any moment. This is the idea which 
he holds more strongly and concretely than the idea 
of patriotism — the idea of self-preservation at all 
costs. And," he adds, ''he is right." 

Sex is the second great demand in the Mexican 
mind. Its practical and psychological phases are 
many, but whether we regard it as emotion, as a 
product of physical need or of intellectual contem- 
plation, it is, as with all primitive peoples, the 
overwhelming call next to food. Although the social 
organization of Mexico does not make its gratifica- 
tion difficult, it is perhaps due to this very psycho- 
logical need that conditions and the social system 
have shaped themselves as they have. There is an 
absence of love in marriage and indeed of any deep 
sentiment in connection with sex, for there is prob- 
ably very little, if any, connection between sex and 
love in the Mexican mind, speaking of the people 
as a whole. 

There is, however, a very definite love of home 
itself in the Mexican which may also be considered 
a true psychological desire. Aside from the pride 
which the Mexican takes in his household and par- 
ticularly in his children, aside from the recognition 
he receives as a substantial citizen in being the 
father of a large family, the love of home is also 
bound up with a devotion to the place itself. 

188 



i 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

Moreover, the home life of Mexico is very beautiful 
in many ways. Wives are devoted and often are 
excellent mothers, so that home ties are deeper 
than is understood by most observers who have 
not been long residents of Mexico or who have not 
had the good fortune to live close to genuine Mexi- 
can homes. The peons and Indians live a largely 
savage life, but as the scale rises, a home life of 
patriarchal and even sentimental beauty takes its 
place and receives, as it deserves, a definite recog- 
nition among psychological needs. 

The gratification of the ''natural impulses" (of 
which sex is the greatest) is prized above honor 
and wealth by most Mexicans. The intellectual 
factors in Mexican emotion, the devotion of most 
of Mexican thought to sensation and the creation of 
sensation-impulses, are but evidences of this great 
psychological ''value." Those who have watched 
the Mexican army during the past years of turmoil 
have had a picture, which will go with them through 
life, of the depths to which human sensuality can 
fall. These years of revolution have given the Mexi- 
cans the impression that the possession of a rifle 
or a revolver carries with it the right to take any- 
thing that may be desired, whether it be food and 
drink, comforts, or the bodies of women for their 
pleasure. The revolutionary armies (on both sides) 
are made up largely of boys of sixteen or thereabouts 
and of men past fifty, — the other men are at work 
in the fields or in the factories and mines. The men 
of fifty (who are old men in Mexico) are in the army 
for their peso a day, but the boys are there, not only 

189 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

for the living that is in it, but for the opportunity 
which is given them for the utterly unbridled satis- 
faction of their lusts and passions, — for the privilege 
of assassination and for the privilege of giving the 
sex-urge untrammeled sway. 

This shades into the love of what the Mexican 
peon calls ''liberty", that is, the license to do what 
he will and act as he chooses. This is a desire which 
exists close to the animal plane and is comparable 
in no manner to the abstract "liberty" which has 
been the rallying cry of all normal men since the 
world began. In Mexico liberty is not a "national 
ideal" but a personal desire — license — and can 
never be justly placed in any other category. The 
revolutions against Spain were, as has been pointed 
out, originally Indian uprisings, and so far as "hb- 
erty and equality" were concerned, these were either 
the enunciations of the native-born whites (who, after 
ten years, took the revolution into their own hands), 
or else the license which "liberty and equality" 
alone means to the lower types of Mexicans. 

The love of adornment is certainly to be grouped 
with Mexican psychological values. The Mexican 
pride in his hat is proverbial, and it would not be 
difficult of understanding save for the fact that he 
has so little pride in any other portion of his cos- 
tume. Hats from ten pesos to one hundred pesos 
used to be the commonplace of the middle-class 
Mexican, and the peon who could possess even a 
straw hat with peaked crown and rolling brim 
adorned with tinsel immediately took a higher 

position with his fellows. 

190 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

Pride, honor and dignity are deep sources of 
desire. Self-respect in Mexico demands recognition 
and so is very liable to receive it. Honors and 
position are likely to be displayed, yet without any 
more self-consciousness than would appear in the 
sometimes false modesty of the Anglo-Saxon. 
Pride of position has always been ground in, and 
its recent manifestations in the new ruhng classes 
are as much atavistic as they are imitative. Even 
the prejudice against physical labor has a partial 
origin in this inherited pride and inherited recogni- 
tion of class distinctions. 

Class pride, indeed, is no mere word in the 
Mexican vocabulary. Class and caste persist 
through poverty and disgrace, and the story is told 
of an indigent Mexican father who refused to let 
his son earn an education by sweeping the school 
floors, because, he said, he did not send his son 
'Ho be taught to be a house servant." A similar 
instance of class pride touches on the story of a 
Mexican who, working as a clerk for two hundred 
pesos a month, received a legacy which would 
bring him one hundred and seventy-five pesos a 
month. He resigned his position at once, and 
when his employer protested, explained that he 
"would lose all standing with people" if he worked 
after he had received a legacy. 

No gentleman will ever carry a package on the 
street, and servants often feel the pride of position 
as much as their masters. One case in point was 
that of a peon who was employed in the very lowly 
position of portero or concierge in the house of a 

191 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Mexican gentleman of ancient family. This por- 
tero, sent to purchase two lamp chimneys, returned 
in the course of an hour, marching grandly before 
a cargador or public porter, the latter bearing aloft, 
one in each hand, the two lamp chimneys. Even 
a cook in a respectable family will hire a cargador 
to transport her day's purchases home from the 
market place. 

The preference of the Mexican youth for those 
calhngs in life which permit him to wear handsome 
clothes and do not require that he soil his hands is 
a trait which differs definitely from that of the 
youths of other lands who apparently display the 
same attributes. In general, Mexican youths 
desire not to meet the conditions of life as English 
or American boys do, but want to be physicians, 
poets, lawyers or bishops. It is perhaps unprac- 
tical education which is responsible, but the choice 
of this form of education goes deep into the psy- 
chology of the people themselves. The outward 
form has a tremendous significance to the Mexican, 
and the fact that he spends an overwhelmingly 
large portion of his income on equipage is sufficient 
proof of this. The Mexican family gives up every- 
thing in time of poverty, down to the furniture 
from the house, and discharges most of the servants, 
before it gives up its carriage or automobile. In 
the days of Diaz a glistening victoria with beautiful 
horses was a sign of position and honor, and this 
was retained to the last. Even after the family, 
forced by poverty, left the capital to five on the 
hacienda, the horse and carriage with the faithful 

192 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

coachman were rented out by the day from a 
Hvery stable or took a place on the street for hire 
to any tourist, but were never sold. 

Mexican writers inveigh against the so-called 
"vanity" of the middle class who endeavor to 
push themselves forward and lay claim to positions, 
social and business, above their normal standing. 
Here we touch upon the highly developed sense of 
personal dignity which characterizes the Mexican 
of every class. Among the peons, and almost in 
inverse ratio to their real worth, this takes the form 
of a false pride and an exaggerated idea of their 
own importance, which they assert (especially in 
their cups) with loud praise of the personal traits 
they have inherited from Indian ancestry. In the 
case of the middle class this amour propre takes on 
a form of excessive self-respect and seK-esteem, 
with a defensive sensitiveness which the foreigner 
almost continually offends. Finally in the upper 
and really intelligent classes it becomes a true 
personal dignity and takes on the aspect of a high 
appreciation of position and responsibility. 

A most typical story is told of a peon miner who 
entered a store kept by a Spaniard and asked for 
velvet. As he was dressed in the poorest sort of 
raiment the proprietor, with considerable sarcasm, 
asked him what he wanted to do with it, as there 
was none of a quality sufficiently cheap for him. 
The miner asked the price of the best and was told 
sneeringly that it was fifteen pesos a yard. He 
drew out a well-filled wallet, threw down thirty 
pesos, took the two yards of velvet and told the 

193 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

storekeeper that such cloth was fit only for his 
burro and that he himself would not use it. He 
then took the velvet, put it on his burro and there- 
after used it as a saddle blanket for the animal. 

You cannot but feel a genuine affection for some 
of these childish outbursts and not a little admira- 
tion for the persistence of a mind which will carry 
through to such lengths. The pity of it is that the 
persistence is not turned in directions which are 
more profitable; it is such negative standards as 
these which are most often clung to with bulldog 
tenacity. 

That tenacity to the rights of dignity must be 
accepted literally if one would work successfully 
with the Mexicans as they are. One successful 
American manager in the oil fields put it thus: 

''You can handle any Mexican, even though he 
is paid like a peon, if you treat him like a gentle- 
man. So I am always courteous to Mexicans of 
every grade, while I curse and roar at the Americans, 
and get better work out of them as a result. I 
reverse the process with the two types of employees : 
treat the American hke a peon and pay him like a 
gentleman, and treat the Mexican like a gentleman 
and pay him like a peon." 

Not all will agree on the wisdom of this manager's 
methods with his foreign employees, but his rule 
as it applies to Mexicans is significant in its success. 
The dignity and ''sensitiveness" which are at its 
root take varying forms in Mexico. It is a fact 
that the expulsion of the American Red Cross from 
Mexico during the Carranza revolution was solely 

194 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

because the organization's reports of conditions had 
offended the dignity of the Mexican nation, not 
because its services were not needed. A proverb 
expresses the native conception of the national 
dignity, ''A Mexican is a man, but above all, he 
is a Mexican." 

This Mexican honor, pride and sensitiveness, so 
much discussed, are indeed very real psychological 
desires, even if, as a none too appreciative American 
business man put it, "a Mexican uses his sensitive- 
ness as a polecat uses his defensive faculties." 
The average Mexican, in private as well as in 
official life, sets great store upon his pride and 
sensitiveness, and even though we may consider 
them mostly the vaporings of an empty mind or the 
self-assertion of a conscious inferior, they and all 
their related manifestations remain, definitely, 
among those choices which determine the action 
of will. 

Mexican honor as such is likely to strike the 
foreigner, especially the foreigner of Anglo-Saxon 
blood and training, as somewhat peculiar. As we 
have seen, it is more than likely to take the form 
of a greater concentration on the appearance of 
cleverness and ability to get the better of an 
opponent by foul means as well as fair — that is on 
prestige — than on the maintenance of one's own 
seK-respect. It is peculiarly the characteristic of 
the Mexican of almost any class that you can call 
him every name in his long vocabulary of epithets, 
can accuse him of theft, arson and murder without 
arousing his very deep resentment — ^provided al- 

195 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

ways that the conversation is between "man and 
man", that there is no outside person present. 
But let the least of these epithets or the mildest of 
these accusations be made in the presence of a 
third party, and insult and deep dishonor have 
been thrust upon an innocent and outraged victim. 

Truth as a factor in honor is hardly given the 
importance which peoples of other races and train- 
ing place upon it. As has been noted on earlier 
pages, the lie is not only a recognized factor of 
Mexican temperament and indeed of all Mexican 
life, but lying itself is not regarded as in the slightest 
sense a betrayal of one's personal honor. 

The Mexican code of honor puts the highest 
valuation upon grace and charm rather than upon 
truth. To a Mexican truth is very likely to be 
disagreeable and is therefore objectionable, while 
grace and understanding are conveyed by the 
Spanish word simpatico (which will be understood 
by its correlation to the French word of similar 
form). It is this high estimate of charm and grace 
of manner, and kindliness of thought and action, 
which characterizes more than any single thing 
the Mexican idea of those social virtues which are 
worth while. 

Mexican politeness is intimately associated with 
this appreciation of charm and grace. The Mexi- 
can thinks first of the immediate personal impres- 
sion on his friend or the person to whom he wishes 
to be courteous. He will, from the best intentions 
in the world, cheerily inform him that the journey 
he must take will not occupy over an hour, although 

196 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

he knows from personal experience that it will 
take three, because he does not wish to be the 
giver of bad news. But he is thoroughly frank 
about it all, although the difference between his 
actual feelings and the politeness of his courtesy 
is often very great. One of the most illuminat- 
ing examples of this was unconsciously furnished by 
one of the old Creole aristocrats of Mexico during 
the occupation of Vera Cruz by the American 
forces in 1914. 

A close friend of his, an American lawyer, was 
offered the post of civil governor of the port under 
the occupation, a position which to those who over- 
looked the emphasis on national dignity in the 
Mexican mind might have seemed one from which 
the holder might exercise an authority which 
would be of great benefit to Mexicans and to his 
own standing with them. Hearing that his Ameri- 
can friend had accepted the appointment, this 
Mexican gentleman offered his congratulations 
most sincerely when he accidentally met him. But 
the American had dechned the honor, and when 
he told the Mexican, the latter grasped both his 
hands, and cried: 

''Then I do congratulate you!" 

The Mexican is extremely susceptible to praise, 
and this good coin of appreciation is perhaps purer 
gold in Mexico than in any other spot in the world. 
Sincere appreciation breaks down every wall and 
surmounts every enmity, but the foreigner who 
attempts it must be sure in his own heart that he 
means what he says, else woe betide him in his 

197 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

attempts at flattery. The Mexican's apparent 
flattery is a form of politeness, but the Mexican 
knows when to accept it as pohteness with the 
valuation which politeness receives in Mexico and 
when to accept it as a true expression of personal 
esteem and appreciation. This, the foreigner is 
not likely to be able to do, so that in his choice 
of words and of phrases he does well to know 
that he means exactly what he tells the Mexican 
in his friendship. 

Prestige on an intellectual plane has its decided 
place in the list of Mexican values. The Mexican 
desires prestige and knowledge as he desires many 
other pleasant things in life, but when he comes to 
weigh that prestige against the effort which would 
be required to achieve it, he is very likely to find 
that the effort is more than the prestige is worth. 
This psychological attitude toward education has a 
most important bearing on the entire educational 
problem. In education, as in nearly everything 
else, the Mexican of whatever class must truly be 
convinced that any effort required of him is well 
worth the cost. 

Continual diversion is the best of safety valves 
for racial and personal ambitions which have been 
suppressed or even forgotten in national and in- 
dividual crises, and the forms of play and amuse- 
ment are, as we have seen, a definite psychological 
need of the Mexican. 

Money and property come in the varying points 

in the scale of desires. In the upper classes the 

ownership of lands belongs in the category of pride 

198 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

and honor; in the middle class, including the 
rancheros, or small farmers, land ownership is very 
largely a matter of food and clothing, as well as 
pride of position. In the lower classes, however, 
the ownership of land means more often the holding 
of a property which can be be converted into cash, 
which in its turn can go for food, comforts and 
amusements. This is proven again and again by 
the sale of small properties to rancheros or hacen- 
dados as soon as communal properties have been 
broken up. This phenomenon is like that which 
the United States has witnessed time and again in 
years past, during the break-up of the Indian 
reservations, comparable to the communal lands 
of the Indians of Mexico. A second (if secondary) 
reason for the peon's interest in land comes from 
his love of the tierra, the soil itself. The Indian 
loves the land of his birth and the mixed-blood 
Mexican has a similar feeling. In both it is 
extremely localized, and this of itself makes the 
ownership of that particular property of senti- 
mental importance. 

It seems perfectly sound to place the desire for 
money, as such, low in the scale of Mexican values. 
The average Mexican works for his living and com- 
fort, and seldom for the money or the power which 
accompanies money. Tied up with the conception 
of money is the land question just stated. Pur- 
chasers of railway rights of way in Mexico often 
found it difficult to buy land that was identified 
as the owner's tierra. Mexicans again and again 
refused to sell their home sites at almost any price. 

199 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

One man refused three hundred dollars an acre for 
the land on which his house was built, but offered 
to sell land of the same quality across the fence for 
fifty cents an acre. Another instance bearing on 
the primacy of living over money is the story of a 
peon who refused to sell a piece of timber land which 
a railroad wished to use as a terminal, but offered 
to cede the property without price, providing he 
were given the contract of clearing it of timber at 
the ordinary charge for such work. This Mexican 
wanted not the money for the land, but the work 
which would support him. 

This failure to connect money and living instinc- 
tively is a psychological complex which is signifi- 
cant. It goes back to the feudal days and to the 
habit of the lower-class Mexican of looking to his 
patron and to his hacienda for the necessities of life. 
Living from day to day, purchasing food for three 
meals only, as is the custom throughout all Mexico, 
the value of money, as such, lessens, and the value 
of work is over-emphasized. It may well be that it 
is to this valuation that we must trace the fact that 
the Mexican laborer works slowly and apparently 
listlessly through endless hours. In the earlier 
revolutionary period, and in the present period of 
unrest, the crowded cities and the sparse population 
in the countryside, the naked children starving and 
fighting with dogs over refuse from the garbage 
piles, the buyers and sellers of old clothes, all present 
a picture that may well explain it. A Mexican 
sociologist has discussed its psychology in describ- 
ing the period previous to 1876: 

200 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

Men who were given work worked as slowly as they could 
for fear that there would not be any more work. The sole 
idea was to keep work ahead. Hunger made these people 
delay completion for fear they would have no more chance to 
earn their living. They received 37 centavos, silver, for a 
twelve-hour day. Now (in the time of Diaz) the Mexican 
laborer has been able to count on daily work, and the Mexican 
is more ready to work than one credits him with being. Up 
to now there has been so little for him to do in comparison 
with the number who needed work that the situation has led 
to the conditions which are generally described as chronic.^ 

Such an attitude accounts for much of the cluig- 
ing of the Mexican to the peonage system. He 
finds in the assurance of steady work both his inde- 
pendence and his self-respect. He is even suspicious 
if he is offered money, for that seems to mean that 
he is going to lose his job, which is far more of an 
insurance to him than such an uncertain and un- 
productive commodity as money. The lower-caste 
Mexican wishes to be carefree, and the possession 
of great capital is less significant to him than a debt 
which guarantees him a job. 

The attitude of the American or European toward 
money as an intrinsic thing was in old days quite 
incomprehensible to the Mexican. To him, the 
giving of money was no different from the giving 
of food, or the giving of a gift which may or may not 
have actual money value. Part of the hospitaUty 
of the Mexican home in the simpler era was the 
leaving of loose change in the guest room for the 
use of the visitor, if need arose. 

1 Julio Guerrero, "La Genesis del Crimen en Mexico," Mexico 
City, 1916, page 138. 

201 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

This brings us directly to the subject of patri- 
archal dependence, one of the basic facts of Mexican 
relationships. It seems fair to consider this as a 
true psychological desire. Only under a patriarchal 
regime can one laugh and be happy and live without 
money. The childlike character of the Mexican in 
his inheritance from the Indian demands a helping 
hand and the right to play and to work and to have 
a revolution without the unhappy formalities which 
modern civilization requires as accompaniments of 
these recreations. Confiding and simple, the lower 
class seeks cheerily to go to some one else in an 
emergency. The upper classes enjoy the role of 
protector, and so the circle is complete, and the 
Mexican desire finds expression in a quite beautiful 
paternalism. 

The desire for a chief who will take an interest 
and at the same time will be a master appears al- 
ways in Mexican history and in the relations of 
Mexicans to their employers. One might even sug- 
gest that President Carranza's leaning toward the 
German side in the Great War may be traceable 
to the instinctively Mexican desire for a master, 
which is a role the German enjoys filling. 

The devotion to an understanding master is one 
of the deep traits of Mexican character. An 
American engineer tells of stopping on a night 
march for a few hours' rest en route to a forest 
fire and of sleeping at a height of twelve thousand 
feet with a band of Mexicans, each of whom had 
only his single blanket. Yet, when the American 
awoke after a brief rest, he found that three 

202 



WHAT IS WORTH WHILE 

of the Indians had covered him with their own 
zarapes. 

Only one instance more, and we must leave the 
discussion of Mexican desires. The attitude of the 
Indian toward the Emperor Maximilian — who came 
with his fair blond beard and his retinue of 
European courtiers, his shiploads of silver plate 
and gilded coaches — was hke what they might have 
shown to a Messiah. They loved him for his 
splendor and they loved him for the spirit in which 
they and he beheved he had come. A liberator is 
to them always something sublime and beautiful, 
something which they can worship and love. 

A similar sight greeted those who came to Mexico 
City with Madero on that wonderful triumphal 
journey from the mountains of the north. It took 
him four days to make the seven hundred miles 
from Parras, his home, to the capital, for by day 
and night he was greeted at every station by 
hundreds and thousands of people who regarded 
him, as he did himself, as their deliverer. By foot 
and horseback came all the people of the villages, 
and as if by that strange telepathy which prevails 
among savage peoples, the crowd came to stations 
where no word was ever known to have been sent 
that Madero was coming. He, too, was received 
as a dehverer and greeted with wonderful affection 
and appreciation by a people who called him ''the 
apostle" and made his trip to Mexico a triumphal 
journey comparable to any in all history. 

This was not Madero any more than it was 

Maximihan; any more than it was Diaz at the 

203 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

height of his power, or Juarez, in his old black coach 
during his long years of exile in the interior. It 
was the spirit of a simple people welling up to 
express itself, to express the thing which it had 
convinced itself stood for its greatest need. Un- 
stable it doubtless was, but it was Mexico, and in 
Mexico it was beautiful and significant, perhaps 
the most significant of all the desires which have 
found expression, — the long search, the pitiful 
search for the leader, for the understanding master 
who will solve the pressing problems of the people's 
miserable life. 



204 



CHAPTER IX 

THE MEXICAN CROWD 

SIGNIFICANT, interesting, illuminating as is 
the study of the mind process of the individual, 
the true differentiation of one people from all their 
fellows does not appear until we find our way into 
the dynamic realm of group behavior. It is like 
dropping the whittling of dolls to take up the chisel 
and shape a statue out of Hving marble to move 
from the psychology of the individual Mexican to 
the psychology of the Mexican group. Here action 
takes the place of static observation, and the throb- 
bing hope of a real redemption replaces the mere 
recording of the sorry list of enslaved mentalities. 

In the observation of the Mexican mind in its 
group functionings, we find as many faults of 
action, as many apparently unworthy motives and 
hopeless failures as in its individual manifestations. 
But here we find, too, the tremendous, the encourag- 
ing fact, that all these individual and group mani- 
festations point to one pregnant condition — the 
long existence of the Mexican upon the lower 
planes of mind life. Here we learn that he has not 
degenerated from a higher individual and group 
existence, but that he is struggling along the long 
hard road of human advancement, the road which 

205 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

humanity has traveled before him, and that his 
failures are in his being yet only on the road. 
He is reaching, through the mazes of his primitive 
mind, for those gains which make our life a harder 
struggle, perhaps, but at least a struggle in the 
open and not in those dark halls of hopelessness in 
which the Mexican people must still find their way. 

In that darkness their minds grope, minds, 
as we have seen, different in myriad ways from our 
own, moving on different planes and with values 
and methods of thought which we perhaps never 
touched in all our long race history. There would 
be horror if, once raised to a higher level, they had 
slipped back the centuries which their present con- 
dition seems to indicate. But as we study their 
group life we shall come once more to the con- 
clusion which has been stated in this book and 
elsewhere, — that it is deep race heritage and tradi- 
tion that has kept the Mexicans for so long from 
the hght of progress and civihzation. In this, 
they are far better off than lands where, with 
greater knowledge, with higher ideals inculcated in 
youth by education and example, the mass and some 
of the leaders as well, have slipped back to the 
lower planes, and, despite their knowledge, live 
content within the self-seeking realm of hunger for 
only the animal desires. 

The human struggle upward from the animal to 
the true social and socialized hfe has been epito- 
mized as the emergence through four planes, four 
planes on which there are thirteen *' hungers", 
thirteen vital desires, each of which in its turn 

206 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

has dominated the hfe of the individual and formed 
the hfe of the human group. We can hterally test 
the civihzation of any individual or group or nation 
by finding the ''hungers" in this hst which dom- 
inate his or its life. Such a test will just here 
clarify our concept of the Mexican group-mind. 

The four groups and the thirteen social hungers^ 
are these : 

I. Ontogenetic (Individual evolution) : 1. Hun- 
ger for nutrition. 2. Brute assertion. 3. Fear, 
the dawning of thought for self-preservation. 

II. Phylogenetic (Group evolution) : 4. Sex-hun- 
ger. 5. Hunger for offspring, the dim beginnings of 
altruism. 6. Kin-sympathy, tribal organization, 
but not widely altruistic. 

III. Ecogenetic (Evolution of Property) f 7. Hun- 
ger for wealth. 8. Hunger for economic dominance. 
9. Hunger for place and caste. 

IV. Sociogenetic (Social evolution) : 10. Hunger 
for knowledge, the beginnings of desire for identi- 
fication with the cosmos. 11. Ideals, the hunger 
for completeness and for true feeling. 12. A so- 
cialized will, the hunger for an idealized society and 
for self-investment in its weal. 13. God-conscious- 
ness, the supreme hunger and the supreme cosmic 
dynamic, for the summation of reason, feehng and 
volition. 

With this rod-stick in hand, it is not difficult to 

reafize that the Mexican as a group has only a f oot- 

t> 

^ The list is taken without apology from the charts in the 
published lecture notes of the author's honored master, Doctor 
Daniel Moses Fisk, Professor of Sociology at Washburn College. 

207 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

hold on the third plane, that of materialism, and 
has virtually no conception of the fourth plane with 
its great social hungers for the welfare of the race. 
This is true not only of the lower types of Indians 
but of the vast majority of the upper ranks of 
mestizos, only a few of whom have begun to mani- 
fest even the none too elevated hungers for econo- 
nomic dominance and place. The rarity of the 
type of man who has even the desire for knowledge 
in its higher sense (outside its immediate value 
in his business) has always been remarked in 
Mexico, the paucity of hbraries and centers of 
higher education throughout the country being 
sufficient evidence. 

It is interesting to note that the regime of Diaz, 
when Mexico reached the zenith of her progress 
(up to the present), was devoted to the hope of 
raising the mass of the Mexicans to the full benefits 
of the third or ecogenetic plane, where what we 
commonly call ambition manifests. The directing 
hand was that of Porfirio Diaz and of the men about 
him, men dominated primarily perhaps by the 
hunger for place and power, but lightened also by 
the higher hungers for knowledge and for the 
ideahzed society toward which they alone of all the 
Mexicans seemed to be reaching. 

Below them, as ever, was the mass of the people, 
dominated by the fear impulses, with the cunning, 
the sham and the jealousy, the self -defensives and 
the cruelties which, motivated by brute assertion, 
are the mimic of the clear-eyed, reasoning will of the 
higher, social plane. That mass is there to-day, 

208 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

and their entire group life is made up of these 
reactions, with never, in all the sweep of their 
activities, one rift in the clouds of race-inheritance 
toward the higher realms of feeling and altruism. 

It is just this persistence that makes men of 
other races and other cultures fail and fail again in 
understanding the Mexicans of to-day — we cannot 
beheve that the motives of the higher realms are 
missing, and most of all we cannot believe that they 
have never existed in the Mexican mind. The 
tragedy of all our dealings with them has been either 
that we have appealed in vain to the higher motives 
which we cannot conceive as being absent, or that 
we have relegated the entire company of Mexicans 
to the role of degenerates because we know, with 
cynical assurance, that they have ''lost" all sem- 
blance of the higher desires which alone could 
respond on that plane. In both we are wrong, and 
until we reaUze this, we shall struggle uselessly 
either to touch and stir or to understand them. It 
is not that they have hidden those qualities, or 
that the whole people have lost them. They have 
never reached to that plane, and in this there is no 
blame or any basis for discouragement. Rather the 
fact, so patent on analysis, is a beacon of hope; for 
they can and, heaven willing, they shall rise to it, 
through education and a broader socialization. 

In the individual psychology of the Mexican we 

have found many faults and a few virtues; in the 

crowd we shall find fewer virtues and greater faults. 

But this is a law of the group, a tragic law to be 

sure, but one that works on every people, be they 

209 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Hottentots or Scandinavians; and Mexico comes 
under its sway. But the group which has never 
achieved to great virtue gives, verily, more to be 
hoped for than that which has been great and good 
and has fallen from its high estate. In the group 
we enter a field where the individual is but an atom. 
So in this study let us continue to ignore the pitiable, 
tiny parcel of leaders who, ignorant of all but the 
struggle for power and money, are exploiting not 
only the world without, its capitalists, its workers 
and its diplomats, but also their own people, people 
who on their own plane of virtually tribal commun- 
ism have in themselves the seeds of development. 

Thus we come to a phase of the stiU controversial 
study of "crowd psychology" which is relatively 
simple. The scientists have, since crowd psychology 
was enunciated, struggled with the diiBGicult adapta- 
tion of the idea of the individual will to the "group 
mind." Rousseau first noted the difficulty when he 
said that the "will of all" is seldom the "general 
will." A more recent authority has put it more 
completely: 

The aggregate which is society has, in virtue of its past 
history, positive qualities which it does not derive from the 
units which compose it at any one time; and in virtue of 
these qualities it acts upon its units in a manner very dif- 
ferent from that in which the units as such interact with 
each other.i 

In Mexico, while this difference between indi- 
vidual and group behavior exists, there is a surpris- 

1 William MacDougaU, "The Group Mind," New York, 1920, 
page 9. 

210 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

ing absence of the confusion which psychologists 
find in other peoples. The group mind is indeed 
less worthy than the individual mind, but the 
tremendous hold of tradition makes the domination 
of the group will virtually inevitable. This is of 
itseK an important simplification of the problem of 
Mexican group psychology, and at the same time a 
tempting invitation for the uplift of the Mexican 
through the intelligence of his more cultured white 
brothers. 

Individually the typical Mexican seldom thinks 
for himself above the purely animal plane, but in 
the group he has his strength of tradition and his 
fixed criterions of importance and unimportance. 
All these go back to the tribal organization in which, 
very literally, he still lives. There the old self- 
defensive and self-assertive instincts are at work, 
and with the sanction of the group, the Indian func- 
tions with inevitable precision and goes to battle, 
to pillage, to rape and ruin, and cheerfully to his 
own annihilation, if the group mind and the group 
traditions advocate it. The comparison is easy if 
we take but the one example of individual responsi- 
bility. 

In highly organized societies, crime is personal and 
moral responsibility is on the individual; in tribal 
life the whole clan shares the crime and the responsi- 
bility, — even though the clan may not hold its in- 
dividuals to account. On this latter plane dwells 
the Mexican, and we must realize this fact if we 
would understand the primary bases of his relation- 
ship to the world. Even in his predatory stealing, 

211 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

looting, raping, the Mexican acts usually in a 
group, and it is seldom, even in the present dis- 
turbed days, that an individual steals or kills alone. 

The paradox of the petty pilfering of a servant, 
when surrounded by others, and the honesty and 
devotion of perhaps the same servant when vested 
alone with the responsibility of the household, in 
the master's absence, has puzzled many observers. 
It seems, however, to be resolved immediately by 
applying this simple standard of group morality. 
It follows the inevitable law that if, by appeal or 
example, the individual can be lifted from under 
the segis of his traditions, he reaches at once toward 
the higher plane to which, by the history of his 
race, he is tending through the inevitable growth 
up the ladder of the thirteen ''hungers" and the 
four planes of human unfoldment. 

But it is rare indeed that this load of tradition 
can be Hfted. The foreign companies operating in 
Mexico have sought wisely, but doubtless without 
a consciousness of the ladder of social hungers 
which we are discussing, to lift the peon by opening 
the horizon of the pleasures of comfort and well- 
being which we have classified as ecogenetic. In- 
deed, the burden of about all the sociology which 
has ever been applied to the Mexican problem has 
had to do with the idea of an ''increase of wants", 
so that the peon, finding his necessities growing, 
would increase his earning power. A large propor- 
tion of all modern civilization has been built on 
this idea, and it may, indeed, be the way of escape 
for the Mexican. But the experience of managers 

212 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

has tended to but two ends: one has found that 
the Indian, when paid more money, does not in- 
crease his wants but rather reduces his working 
days; the other discovers that the increase of wants 
does not effect an increase of efficiency but, instead, 
a dogged insistence, in the form of strikes or sabo- 
tage, on an increase in pay without any increase 
in efficiency. The '^higher standard of hving" in- 
culcated in this way is not, in other words, a far- 
reaching success, and the bewilderment of the ex- 
perimenting foreigners is appalling. 

Here, once more, it seems that we hark back to 
the group- mind, the domination of tradition, the 
cruel grip of the old fear-regime, when there was 
not work enough or food enough to go round. 
Work had to be conserved by slowness and living 
won by such force as the weakUng could muster, 
chiefly the standing still and howling hke a child 
till he got what he wanted. Often has the foreigner 
found that when, in response to a bonus system, a 
few of his workmen gained greater pay, the imme- 
diate result was a strike in which the beneficiaries 
joined with the "unfortunates" in a demand for 
equal pay, — on the higher scale. 

The failure of all efforts to induce a general climb 
on the part of the Mexican to the plane of ambition 
for economic improvement has its roots in that 
fatalism which, too, is at root traditional. There has 
never been any successful attempt, by education 
or otherwise, to connect the sequences of seed time 
and harvest, effort and reward. 

To the child of that old day (and the Mexican in 

213 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

his group life is obviously but a child of the ancient 
savage time) what will be will be, despite all human 
effort. In the group thinking or rather feeling which 
is characteristic of such a period, the individual 
mind seeks nothing and learns nothing; the desire 
for knowledge is still far off up the long ladder. 
Thus we account, and thus only can we account, 
for the alternate spells of activity and apathy in the 
Mexican. The peon plants his fields with enthusi- 
asm and hope, and then waits for the months of 
ripening without cultivation, without care for the 
weeds, and, indeed, with fatalistic apathy toward 
the forces of nature. Only if the gods or fate allow 
will he have a crop. The domination of the group- 
mind, the absence of the still distant awakening to 
true reason of any kind, keeps him still on the 
plane of the beasts. 

With this background the forms of organization 
in Mexico can be (and actually are) of but one 
kind, — ^what the sociologists call will-organizations. 
Thought organizations are utterly nonexistent, and 
the will-organizations, as we shall see, have absorbed 
all the functions of thought-organization, borrowing 
often from others ideals and systems ill adapted to 
the needs of the country and the people. 

Primary among the will-organizations are the 
essentially tribal units which form Mexican society. 
We have noted above the links of family and kin- 
ship, and the compadre system, which is virtually a 
blood-brother process of adoption and thus essen- 
tially savage. These tribal groupings persist 
throughout Indian Mexico, and tribal and village 

214 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

feuds are met with on any journey that takes one 
among the natives. The devotion of the Mexican 
to his httle bit of territory, his tierra or birth- 
place, and his genuine scorn of any other portion 
of his country or any foreign country, is in itself a 
survival of the old tribal idea and a very real phase 
of the tribal organization as it exists to-day. The 
entire history of Mexico has been the struggle to 
make a nation in the face of tremendously disinte- 
grating elements. It is doubtful if, without the 
Spanish ideals which still dominate it and link a 
supreme individualism with a deep subservience to 
the State as such, the Mexican national organization 
would have persisted. As it is, the national organi- 
zation is in grave peril to-day, when the governing 
group of the country is to all intents and purposes 
a federation of tribal chieftains, each controlhng a 
section of the country and a handful of followers 
(usually all of the same Indian tribe or mestizos 
with some Ungering memory of tribal relationship). 
The form of Mexican will organization which at 
the present time is occupying the most attention, 
inside and outside of Mexico, is rooted in the 
ancient communism from which the tribal divisions 
also spring. The reference is to the so-called 
socialistic unions and syndicates which are dominat- 
ing most of the political and industrial life of the 
country. Previous to the outbreak of socialism 
and bolshevism in Europe following the Great War, 
there was in Mexico httle nation-wide trade union- 
ism or socialistic organization. In the latter days 
of the war, through German socialists, who had 

215 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

come or had remained in Mexico as part of the 
German spy organization there, and American 
radicals who, opposed to war, had made their 
escape from the draft by flying to the friendly 
shadows of Carranza's flag, Mexico began to have 
an awakening in both directions. As a result the 
coimtry had become something of a hotbed of 
socialistic propaganda. Laborers of every type 
have been organized, not along the lines of the 
American and British trade unions, but along 
sjTidicalist forms, feeding, as a natural result, on 
the communistic instincts of the Indian element, 
and thus forming a natural circle around to the 
original form of tribal will grouping. 

At base, then, the groups of Mexico are all forms 
of the will or traditional-volitional organization. 
And here again we swing back to the fundamentals 
of group organization which in the modern world 
are discovered to be in three definite forms. ^ first, 
the individualists, finding the force of their will 
in the institution of private property; second, the 
socialists or coUectivists, basing their power on the 
idea of the State, and third, the syndicalists, non- 
local associations based primarily on the occupa- 
tional rakings. These divisions in their turn hark 
back to the divisions along the cleavage of the 
property instinct, varying of course in the different 
races and nations of the world. 

In Europe, and to a lesser extent in the United 
States, the idea of the individualists has been 

1 Cf. Graham Wallas, "The Great Society/' New York, 1913, 
pages 290-291. 

216 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

» 

gradually breaking down. The factory system, 
taking the place of the old domestic system of 
production, has tended toward the elimination of 
the ideas of individualism and the primacy of 
property, so that the shift toward the concept of the 
social obligations and duties of capital (which is 
property) has come gradually. The slow evolu- 
tion away from the old idea of the "identity of 
interest between producer and consumer" has also 
come with relative slowness, giving at least some 
time for adaptation, as concentration has taken the 
place of competition. But in Mexico these changes 
have come with a suddenness which has wrought 
an appalling confusion. 

Still in the age, largely, of domestic and individ- 
ual production, she has had swept down upon her 
the whole avalanche of modern thought. The most 
"advanced" sort of theories have been handed to 
her with literally no background of experience and 
slow adaptation by which to adjust them. The 
result has been that she has fastened the modern 
shibboleths of socialism to the most archaic type 
of communism existing in the world, and collectiv- 
ism and syndicalism are jumbled with more com- 
plete chaos than is to be found even in Russia. 
Those who find food for fear in the rapid evolution 
of the socialistic principles of the British or Amer- 
ican workingman will find themselves happy indeed 
to go back to that homely apprehension after a 
contemplation of the chaos of Mexican working 
conditions. 

The psychological attitude of the Mexican group 
217 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

toward its so-called ''social revolution" (and here 
we can discuss only those psychological attitudes) 
has been set forth with exceeding clearness by the 
I. W. W. organizer, John Murray.^ 

In describing the invasion and sacking of Mexico 
City by General Alvaro Obregon (later president 
of Mexico) Mr. Murray wrote: 

After Felix Diaz ran away, after Huerta fled, General 
Obregon held Mexico City for the Constitutionalist govern- 
ment. Meanwhile, Zapata was blowing up trains and gener- 
ally demoralizing traffic in and out of the City of Mexico, so that 
bread was scarce and the people threatened with starvation.^ 
The mills which ground corn for the public entirely failed to 
provide masa for the people, and women were making long 
trips into the country to get the wherewithal to make bread. 
Bakeries had notices posted in front of their shops stating that 
they had no flour. Only English biscuits sold in a few shops 
catering to the rich and were purchasable at a rate of from four 
to eight dollars a kilo. 

Then it was that General Alvaro Obregon, commanding the 
Constitutionalist troops in the City of Mexico, made a declara- 
tion that "the merchants did not accept the invitation which 
was made to them to assist the people in their dire need, and 
thus prevent violence." 

"The time has come," he added, "when the people may 
make use of a right (the right of revolution), which in other 
circumstances would be prohibited to them, and which any 
authority would have to oppose. Authority can never be the 
authority of anybody, but of justice only, and should dispense 
justice to persons or collectivities if they deserve it, but when 

1 "Behind the Drums of Revolution," The Survey, New York, 
December 2, 1916, Volume XXXVII, pages 237-244. 

2 Mr. Murray does not accept the report that General Obregon 
shipped carloads of corn and beans out of Mexico City to be sold 
for the profit of the Carranza generals and for the maintenance 
of their armies in the field. 

218 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

one part of the community turns away from justice and up- 
rightness, the government should not defend it against a 
sacred right wliich it has placed in the people's hands." ^ 

Soon after, the Casa del Obrero Mundial ^ met with Rafael 
Zubaran Capmany^ and signed an agreement in which the 
Constitutionalist government ofl&cially recognized their mutu- 
ality of aims. Thousands of workingmen paraded through the 
streets of Mexico, headed by the red flag, and were saluted 
by the staff officers of General Obregon as they passed his 
headquarters in the St. Francis Hotel. 

The following pact was signed between organized labor and 
the Constitutionalist government officially, the first time in 
history, as far as I am aware, that a National government 
ever entered into a working agreement with a labor 
organization. 

Here Mr. Murray inserts in full the text of the 
famous 'Hreaty" by which the government agreed 
only to '^ attend with all the sohcitude it has used 
up to date, to the workers' just claims arising 
from their labor contracts with their employers" 
and the Casa del Obrero Mundial pledged itself to 
furnish its membership for police force (with 
remuneration) and also to ''carry on an active 
propaganda to win sympathy for the Constitution- 
alist government among all the workers through- 
out the republic and the working-class world, 
pointing out to the Mexican workingmen the 
advantages of joining the revolution, inasmuch 
as it will bring about the improvement the working 

1 This quotation is of great significance as an essentially sympa- 
thetic presentation of General Obregon's famous "invitation to loot" 
which was posted throughout Mexico City during his occupation. 

2 LiteraUy, the House of the Workers of the World — the I. W. W. 
2 Later Minister of Commerce and Industry in the cabinet of 

President Obregon. 

219 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

class is seeking through its unions." The final 
clause provides that: 

The workers who take up arms in the Constitutionalist 
government and also the female workers who perform service 
in aiding or attending the wounded, or other similar service 
will be known under the one denomination; whether organized 
in companies, battalions, regiments, brigades or divisions, all 
will be designated as "Reds." 

There were many such "Red" units in the Con- 
stitutionalist army, and apologists for General 
Obregon have always stated that his agreement 
with the Casa del Obrero Mundial was because he 
needed new troops and found this an excellent and 
easy way to get them. Carranza afterward broke 
with the Casa del Obrero Mundial and for a time 
during his regime the organization was ostensibly 
and officially dissolved. It later assumed its old 
place and importance. 

Mr. Murray goes on after setting forth the 
agreement: 

It is plain why organized labor supported the Consti- 
tutionalist government in Mexico: food, guns in workers' 
hands, opportunity to organize, to strike and raise the standard 
of living, all this was reason enough. But what inducement 
was it that persuaded middle-class Mexicans to become 
upholders of a governmental programme that called for land 
nationalization and all the preliminary steps that led to a 
socialization of industry? I found scores of men like Con- 
stitutionalist Secretary of State Cabrera; Secretary, of Gober- 
nacion Zubaran; the general who practically snatched Mexico 
from the reaction, Obregon; men educated in Paris and Berlin, 
like Atl and Rolland — and all that class which in every other 
country under the sun shys at the nationaUzation of anything 

220 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

and constitutes the most bitter enemy of militant labor or- 
ganizations, here in Mexico falHng one over another to propose 
new steps whereby the resources of Mexico could be put into 
the hands of government. 

Mr. Murray did not answer his own question, 
save by the Mexican method of producing an 
analogy and further examples, citing the famous 
speech of Roque Estrada, one of Carranza's supreme 
court judges, who in administering the oath to a 
group of new judges is quoted as declaring: 

"You will say to me that there are articles to be adhered to 
contained in a book called 'Law/ but I must remind you 
that we are condemning and rejecting all that has previously 
taken place and that there exist no laws or regulations which 
bind us to any definite procedure, and so it becomes necessary 
to apply a strictly revolutionary spirit in order that the admin- 
istration of justice may answer its purpose in fulfiUing the 
aspirations of the revolution, which has now materialized 
into a government." 

No better statement of the Mexican "sociahs- 
tic" movement from within has ever been written 
than this frank and cynical description of. Mr. 
Murray.^ It goes far, however, to support the 
assertion made above that the chaos of the Mexican 
radical movement has been made complete by the 
confusion of foreign ideas with ancient Mexican 

1 A valuable analysis of the Constitution of 1917, the palladium 
of Mexican "socialistic" liberties, has been done by Lie. Jorge 
Vera Estafiol, former Minister of Education of Mexico: J. Vera 
Estafiol, "Al Margen de la Constitucion de 1917," Los Angeles, 
1920. The English translation, unfortunately called "Carranza and 
His Bolsheviki Constitution", was also published. The Wayside 
Press, Los Angeles, 1920. 

221 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

communism. The incidents described by Mr. 
Murray and the documents cited are all, obvi- 
ously, the product or inspiration of foreign radicals 
like himself, while the actual developments in the 
history of the movement indicate that the true 
stimulating element is not the foreign spirit but 
the native, ingrained conception of communistic 
ownership. 

The land and labor questions in Mexico have been 
described elsewhere^ and the psychology of the 
Mexican, working as a group from the ancient tra- 
ditions surrounding these two factors, has tended 
to take every new idea from without and shape it 
to forms as old as Mexico itself. The idea of the 
nationalization of land and industry becomes, 
thus, the idea of land distribution for the benefit 
of the lowly, who thus achieve, not socialization, 
but individual property again, property to be dis- 
posed of as promptly as possible for a circulating 
medium which can be spent. The only residuum 
of socialization that is desired is the possession of 
communal lands of the old Indian type; but this 
alone is not satisfactory, for there must also be 
personal redistribution so that the beneficiaries 
may sell and enjoy the proceeds. 

The basic difficulty with foreign socialistic ideas 
is and has always been that the Mexican, due to his 
Indian antecedents, demands this communal con- 
dition but does not at the same time accept com- 
munal responsibility. On the "socialistic" plane 
he fails even more than on the plane of individual 

1 Cf. "The People of Mexico," pages 315 et seq. 
222 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

property, through his utter inability to work any- 
thing out without the substantial aid of paternal 
guidance of some sort. He had this under the Aztec 
rule, in his own princes; he had it under the 
Spaniards in the firm if sometimes ill-considered 
rule of the viceroys and of the rising aristocracy of 
Spanish and lightly diluted mixed-bloods; after a 
welter of revolutions which were in essence chiefly 
a quarrel over whether the whites or the mestizos 
should have the privileges and the profits of 
government, he had this same paternalistic pro- 
ection under Diaz. His chief psychological dif- 
ficulty in the past ten years has been frankly the 
removal of this paternalistic support. In the final 
analysis he is still in the stage where genuine 
disinterested leadership is needed, and needed 
badly, to carry on his development for a few years 
or perhaps for a few generations longer. Foreign 
socialism has not yet — nor will it soon — evolve such 
leadership in the Mexicans themselves. 

But the world has been hurrying forward, and 
because of the deep communal sense of the Mexican, 
because of the continuing truth that fishing is best 
in troubled waters, Mexico has become a rich field 
for ''socialistic" exploitation. The result has been 
that much has been done in the name of socialism 
and the ''social revolution" which in other times 
has been done under other names. 

Meanwhile, the "drums of revolution" roll on, 
and Mexico and the Mexicans march to their 
rhythm. But behind the drxmas is to be found, not 
the mere retailing of incident and the picturing of 

223 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the strength of foreign radical ideas in Mexico, 
as Mr. Murray found, but rather the age-long social 
organization of the Mexican group. This, in literal 
fact, is the fundamental of her life. The relationship 
of the Mexican groups concern us far more, in the 
long view which we are seeking of the Mexican 
mind, than any outbreak of borrowed national or 
radical ideas. 

Mexico is divided, by the exigencies of her racial, 
political and industrial history, by most distinct 
class and caste cleavages. These are the essential 
group formations, and the spirit of caste has 
a distinct bearing on the whole psychology of 
the country. This condition is likely to be more 
easily understood in England than in the United 
States, although in actuality the Mexican ac- 
ceptance of the distinct class groupings is by no 
means comparable to the English conception of 
such divisions. 

There is, however, a surprising lack of servility, — 
the Mexican, from peon to president, is apparently 
thoroughly satisfied with his lot, or willing, at least, 
to make the best of it. 

The peon on the street is utterly unconscious of 
his often dirty clothing, and except that his polite- 
ness (for which we have to thank the Roman 
Catholic Church much more than any racial inherit- 
ance) makes him give the inside of the walk, closest 
to the wall, to his social superiors, might himself be 
the master of the town which he regards with such 
calm assurance. A writer on Mexico in the early 
days records his astonishment at the assurance of 

224 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

the driver of the mule pack-tram with which his 
carriage traveled through some of the bandit- 
ridden country and quoted the peroration of '^ Jose 
Maria Sanchez, arriero (mule driver) of Mexico", 
who told, with truth, of the trust which was put in 
him by great hacendados and noble families, and 
how that trust was never betrayed. 

For all this apparent contentment of the Mexi- 
cans of the various classes with their positions there 
is a very significant psychological factor in the rela- 
tionships of the different classes to one another. 
The upper-class Mexican — and this is truest of the 
old aristocracy of pre-revolutionary days — ^has a 
considerable conception of responsibilities. True, he 
does not always live up to this conception, but that 
is rather the fault of his social system than of his 
personal or indeed his group psychology. 

The upper-class Mexican regards the lower with 
a strange mixture of distance and brotherhood. 
Eternally their instinct is to consider themselves as 
a people apart, but as inevitably they return to the 
consciousness of their unity with the lower classes 
and of the singleness of the national problem. In 
all his discouragement, in all the misery of his exile, 
the high-class Mexican of to-day looks upon Mexico 
as home, knows how the national problem affects 
his life and his family and seeks no other outlet than 
the regeneration of Mexico itself. A denizen of 
European capitals, often a voluntary expatriate, he 
is still at heart a Mexican, bound to her by ties as 
deep and sincere as those which bind the English- 
man in distant colonies to England. 

225 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

To him, whether he watches in Mexico or from 
exile, the peon and the Indian are somewhat half- 
human, happy when crops are good and work is 
plenty, miserable when the rains fail or work is 
gone. The responsibility is on the aristocrat, as 
he knows only too well, and sometimes he grows 
weary with its hopelessness, longing to turn his 
back upon it, but never really forgetting, never 
really shirking, — so far as his knowledge and 
wisdom may go. 

Racially, the conflict of the individuals within the 
crowd has definite reactions which influence the 
whole. The white Creole and foreigner look upon 
the Indian and upon the mestizo with a certain smug 
tolerance, for the conscious superiority of the 
European and the man of European blood is an 
axiom of all the world. The disdain with which one 
class looks on another can and has been fanned 
into wrath and into war and destruction at various 
periods in Mexico's history. This feeling has a 
conventional form in the various race divisions. 
The Indian, for instance, is the football of all other 
classes. A government report of 1886 speaks of ''a 
people converted into a pack of wolves which is 
managed with . . . harshness." A Mexican writer 
describes the Indians as ''a parasitic race lacking in 
applied will." The Indian, on his part, returns 
the compliment. He despises the mestizo and hat- 
ing the whites, as he has been roused to doing when 
it has suited the convenience of revolutionaries and 
bandits, has taken the chief part in hundreds of up- 
risings against his alleged oppressors, whether 

226 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

Spaniards, Frenchmen, Creoles or mestizo bureau- 
crats under Diaz. 

During the period when class Hues were identical 
with those of race — that is in Colonial times and 
in the early days of the Independence — caste an- 
tagonisms were always sharply defined. The for- 
eigner has ever been more or less a common 
enemy, but the Creole was regarded by the mestizo, 
and Indian as very nearly as much of a foreigner 
as the Spaniard from whom he came. The 1910 
revolution has been described as a "Boxer" up- 
rising against the foreigners, and indeed the list 
of charges made by General Bernado Reyes against 
the Diaz administration were almost entirely con- 
cerned with anti-foreign and chiefly anti- American 
problems, and race antagonism and race jealousy 
thus became national fetishes. 

The most significant development of the race 
classes in Mexico is, however, the patriarchal sys- 
tem. Its origin goes back to the time of the 
Spaniards and beyond them into the communal 
organization of the Aztecs, and its history brings 
us down to the Diaz regime. ''Abolished" finally 
by constitutions and edicts, it still continues in that 
mightier source of power, the will of the people. 
The Indian, lost in the mazes of Spanish culture 
and mestizo administration, clung like a drowning 
man to the traditional system which was all he had 
known for centuries. 

This suits the economics of his existence, for, 
improvident by nature, he cannot understand the 

need of making his labor build not only for to-day 

227 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

but for a possible to-morrow of misfortune. The 
Indian, therefore, prefers to work his httle farm on 
"shares" with the owner of the hacienda, for then if 
his crops fail the hacendado will take care of him. 
On the other hand, if the Indian is the proprietor 
and if, through inadequate rainfall or his own inept- 
itude, his farm produces nothing, he faces starva- 
tion and is more than likely to succumb to it, or to 
find his way into the army or to the inhospitable 
cities. 

The patriarchal system is thus a most important 
psychological fact in Mexico. All who have 
handled Mexican labor know that those who suc- 
ceed best with it are those who approach nearest 
to a paternalistic attitude. It may be impossible for 
the manager of a big plant to know all of his 
employees by their first name, to know the family 
history, how many children there are, and every- 
thing connected with the household, but unless the 
manager or employer does know this, the work- 
man feels that the proper interest is not being taken, 
and he broods over this neglect until he feels 
that the employer is not treating him fairly, where- 
upon he is willing to be as disloyal as he would be 
loyal under other circumstances. 

The long ramifications of the patriarchal system 
start, properly, with the hacienda. Through the 
paternal aid of the great landowners of the early 
days, a whole people was carried upon the shoulders 
of a single class of rich and intelligent individuals. 
Communism and feudalism were there thrown to- 
gether and mixed under conditions which brought 

228 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

forth elements of destruction and elements of im- 
perishable solidity. The system bred an immense 
class of dependents, ready tools of the propaganda 
of the discontented and ambitious, but the sys- 
tem also furnished and continues to furnish a solid 
background of invested capital and property rights 
which have made it possible for Mexico to survive 
all the horrors which have come upon her. 

It seems doubtful if Mexico would long retain 
either her national form or even the gains of her 
''borrowed" civilization without the system of 
dependence. It is significant that under Obregon 
Villa, the arch ''patriot", found that a hacienda was 
the most natural and proper place to which he 
might retire during his period of idleness while 
enjoying his pension from Obregon. 

Villa's acceptance of the hacienda as his natural 
retreat after the years of his battle for place and 
power emphasizes another phase of the caste sys- 
tem. This is the social ladder, which operates in 
Mexico according to much the same principles 
under which it operates in England, for instance. 
The analogy is only academic, but it is a fact that 
in Mexico, as in England, the highest honors of the 
land, including place in the aristocracy, are within 
the reach of every citizen. This is more than the 
mere effulgence of democratic ideals, for the social 
ladder of Mexico has one particular factor which 
does not appear in the social system of the United 
States, for instance. It works to lift every indi- 
vidual who is above the average completely out of 
his group, and thus, by his advancement, to rob 

229 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the lower and middle classes of the vitality and 
intelligence which make the middle classes of the 
United States, for instance, so vivid a factor in the 
national life. 

So far, Mexico has failed to create a true middle 
class. This has been partially due to the continuous 
upsetting of the settled regimes which are indis- 
pensable to such a development. Fundamentally, 
however, it goes back to the operation of the social 
ladder, which has raised every mind of intelligence 
or even of keenness immediately out of its own class 
and into some branch of the aristocracy. In times 
of revolution such men become predatory generals, 
officious bureaucrats, or new hacendados. In normal 
periods, the social ladder operates to drain the best 
blood out of the lower and middle classes to the 
ranks of lawyers, doctors, politicians and priests of 
the Church. The drain up the social ladder is con- 
tinuous, and revolutions seem only to accentuate 
the process, never to change it. 

The age-long dependence on aristocracy which is 
so characteristic of the Mexican mind and of Mexi- 
can history again works to pull every possible 
leader out of his environment and into the ranks of 
government. It is the very power of this suction 
that makes the intellectual level of Mexican leaders 
so low; they are drawn upward by yawning oppor- 
tunity long before they have developed their 
meager powers to the standards which civilization 
demands of the leaders of any people. The result is 
the tragic picture of Mexican life and government 
dominated by individuals unequipped in every way 

230 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

save in personal force to cope with their problems. 
Their continuous failure and their equally con- 
tinuous inability to grasp the reasons for their fail- 
ure only emphasize our great primary thesis that 
the supreme responsibility for action and the ghastly 
failure in action of the Mexican national group rest 
on the shoulders of those who occupy positions of 
power. 

In whatever way we start on the Mexican prob- 
lem, by way of the individual or by way of the race 
or the class group, or through the will organizations 
of the more general type, we inevitably reach this 
point, whether we will or no. In the individual, 
the need is for education, and education must in- 
evitably come through those who are equipped to 
teach and have the executive energy to organize. 
In the race and class groups we find, despite our 
desire to wander far afield into the byways of 
autonomous, self-sufficient, organization, that we 
come back again to the responsibility of the upper 
classes, of those who have the power and the will 
to control and to lead. In the will organizations we 
reach this end once more, through subtler reason- 
ings and perforce by more careful analysis. 

The Mexican prefers to work in groups, and in 
groups he finds his greatest success. He lives in 
towns and not in isolated farms; he works in groups 
in the fields and not alone; if he finds that part of 
the group is put at special work, his crude ideas of 
communistic effort inspire him to rebel and even to 
strike against separation or favoritism. If he is 
offered, in the group, extra pay for better work, he 

231 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

will strike for '^ better pay for equal work", a prin- 
ciple not instilled from without, but part of the 
inbred communism of centuries. 

Yet always in such group organization the typical 
Mexican seeks to attach himself to a master, to 
some sort of chieftain on whom he can rely in crises. 
The strongest practical unit in Mexico is the house- 
hold, the kin organization, and included in it the 
entire army of servants which a Mexican household 
requires. Instinctively the peon is not a drifter, 
moving from one job to another, but prefers to 
work and stay in one family for generations. All 
this is patriarchy, and it goes to the very heart of 
the group and individual life of Mexico. By the 
test of the feminine attitude — and that is likely to 
be the clearest expression of the group idea — this 
goes so far into the ideas of the crowd that it leaves 
the seeker after a purely philosophical answer to 
the Mexican uprisings without a way to turn. 
During one of the violent outbreaks following the 
radical propaganda in the State of Morelos, the 
men workers on a certain hacienda were making 
speeches and howling with approbation (with inev- 
itable crowd stampede) for those who told them that 
the deepest desire of their hearts was for land, land, 
land. But in the outskirts of the crowd were half a 
dozen peon women, with their husbands in tow, 
grumbling audibly to their enthusiastic spouses: 
''Fool, thou; what we want is not land but a good 
master and regular work to keep thee busy." 

Scientifically, the basis for the extraordinary de- 
pendence of the Mexican on his aristocracy (using 

232 



THE MEXICAN CROWD 

the term in the sense of the true ^Hte) Hes m the 
very Ukeness of the race material which makes up 
the nation. All careful students of the Mexican 
people, whether native or foreign, recognize the 
homogeneity in the broadly distributed caste group- 
ings and in the nation as a whole — a homogeneity 
which the more superficial observer utterly loses in 
his appreciative notice of the distinctions of classes 
and communities and tribes.^ This homogeneity is 
everywhere evident, so that a Mexican, whether he 
be Creole or Indian, or any of the gradations be- 
tween, has a method of thought and an attitude 
toward the problems of his people which is often 
surprisingly unified. For this reason, the ideas 
which sweep over Mexico, the sudden stampede to 
this or that system of government, or plan of pro- 
cedure, seem to come from what to us who look on 
from without is a most inadequate stimulus. The 
last word in the philosophy of group psychology 
confirms us: 

It takes a stronger stimulation to obtain like reactions from 
individuals of different color-races or of different ethnic stocks 
of the same color-race than it does to obtain like reactions 
from individuals of the same stock or race.^ 

Here, then, is the opportunity, in this power of 
homogeneity, for the higher types of Mexicans to 
raise and to uplift those of the lower ranks of intel- 
ligence. The same great authority just quoted, 

iC/. "The People of Mexico," Book I, Chapter II, pages 14 
et seq. 

^ F. H. Giddings, "Pluralistic Behavior," American Journal of 
Sociology, January, 1920, Volume XXV, page 392. 

233 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Professor Giddings, expresses the ''law of concerted 
volition" in these terms: 

The percentage number of individuals participating in a 
collective decision diminishes as the intellectual quaUty of the 
decision rises.i 

Thus the hope of Mexico must, by the very laws 
of psychology, be placed in the hands of those few 
who are capable of making the higher decisions, and 
who, by their blood and training, are able to bring 
the executive force to finishing it. 

Mexico's chaos is not due to her lack of what 
the psychologists call ''like-mindedness", but to her 
existence on those lower planes of desires which 
have, as yet, barely lifted her above the level of 
the beasts on to the ecogenetic plane. Just because 
she is like-minded, she will, if lifted with under- 
standing and taught with genuine devotion, move 
along the road of true advancement and true service 
to her own great place in the world. The differences 
between the upper and the lowest classes are im- 
material. The brother who Hves and thinks on the 
higher plane (although it be but a little higher) is 
willing and anxious — and now knows how — to stoop 
and to uplift. 

1 F. H. Giddings, "Pluralistic Behavior," American Journal of 
Sociology, January, 1920, Volume XXV, page 398. 



234 



CHAPTER X 

THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

THE sorriest pictures in the whole gallery of 
Mexican group behavior are those of the 
nation's political history. From the "Grito de 
Dolores^', the rallying cry of the first uprising against 
Spain on September 16, 1810, to the latest opera- 
bouffe "revolution" of yesterday, the record is 
drab with ugly personalities and hideous with un- 
speakable crimes. Here and there only in the long 
panorama are peaks which seem to mark moments 
of devotion and idealism; but even these shrink, 
under observation, toward the ugly level of the rest. 
No more caustic critics of Mexican political life 
can be found than the wiser and saner Mexican 
students of their own people. One of these ^ has 
described the great fundamental evil in these words : 

1 Toribio Esquivel Obregon, "La Influencia de Espana y los 
Estados Unidos Sobre Mexico," Casa Editorial Calleja, Madrid, 
1918, page 98. For the examples in this chapter and elsewhere 
in this book the author is in deep debt to this great scholar. The 
book from which this quotation is taken is the most illuminat- 
ing comparison of poUtical conditions in Mexico and the United 
States that has been printed in any language. It is based on 
Lord Bryce's "The American Commonwealth," with Doctor 
Esquivel Obregon's own interpretation of Mexico's governmental 
system. 

235 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

The history of Mexico does not present a single case of ad- 
justment to principle and to social interest; it presents an 
infinitude of personal compromises. 

The very foundations of the Mexican pohtical 
system are personal. The search in Mexican crises 
is not for a principle, but for a man to lead, and the 
names of the movements which take the place of 
pohtical parties are formed of the names of the 
men who lead them; the supporters of Porfirio 
Diaz were ever the ''Profiristas", never a true party 
name or a coalition of parties; and so down the 
Hne to to-day, Maderistas, Carrancistas, Obre- 
gonistas. Save only when the division was based 
on the religious classification were there real parties, 
Conservatives and Liberals, — but to-day all "par- 
ties" are subdivisions of the Liberals, all personal 
even when masquerading under special but tem- 
porary titles. 

Aside from the personalities supported, there is 
literally no difference in aims, or in promises. 
Mexican pohtics does not divide itself on questions 
of pohcy, and all who are interested in Mexican 
pohtical movements seek to discover the personal 
ideas of the candidates, never the spirit of the 
community. For the candidate chosen will be 
elected on his popularity or power or on the sup- 
port he gets from the strongest faction (usually the 
faction in power). On this. Doctor Esquivel 
Obregon speaks with distressing frankness : 

Reading the programs (or platforms) of the political parties, 
Mexico would appear to be a country where all is harmony 
and peace, because substantially there are no differences in 

236 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

aspirations; only it is customary to have variations in details, 
. . . The motives which attract pubUc opinion to a candidate 
are not liis moral or intellectual qualities but the probability 
of his triumph on account of the support on which he can 
count.^ 

It is this so-called "personalism" in politics 
which has been the bane of Mexican government 
throughout the whole history of the independence. 
It saturates Mexico and gives the outside world 
good reason indeed for its belief that the only hope 
of Mexico is in the control of its government by a 
man who will use the ''iron hand." 

This tradition, which had its origin in Mexico 
itself, is so deeply rooted that only an appreciation 
of Mexican psychology will make it possible for us 
to vary the conception. The facts of Mexican 
history demonstrate the action of that psychology, 
and it is worthy of note that so far back as the 
beginning of the Spanish regime, and throughout the 
three hundred years of Spanish rule, the only 
failures in government were in times when the 
mailed fist was used with unthinking force upon 
the natives and the native-born mixed and white 
bloods. 

The Mexican is ever a follower of leaders 
rather than of ideas, but those leaders, while they 
must be strong, must on the other hand lead, 
rather than drive. The great example, in our 
usual way of thinking of Mexico, is our regarding 
the success of Diaz as due to his strong hand over 

1 Toribio Esquivel Obregon, "La Influencia de Espana y Ids 
Estados Unidos Sobre Mexico," page 126. 

237 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the government. In reality his strength came from 
the wisdom with which, in the very beginning of 
his rule, he brought all elements to compromise and 
used his force, not to control his supporters, but to 
destroy only the open enemies of the country. 
We can look back on the factors which brought 
about his fall, — the sudden cruelties of his murder 
of the striking workmen in the Orizaba cotton mills, 
his forcing on the country an unpopular man for 
vice-president, and his forgetting, in his old age, his 
traditionally friendly and benevolent interest in 
the affairs of the common people. It seems indeed 
that his political death came chiefly through his 
too heavy use of his power and the abuses which 
his officials perpetrated in the name of the "Iron 
Hand of Diaz." 

At the root of this theory of personalism and the 
need of the iron hand (shared alike, remember, by 
the Mexican and the foreign observer) is the as- 
tonishing political history of Mexico. A brief 
explanation is necessary to any understanding of 
the complicated psychology of Mexican politics. 

The most colossal and disastrous effect of that 
imitative faculty which has come down through 
Indian time and persists so forcibly in the Mexican 
of to-day has appeared in the succeeding systems 
of government. From the time of the early in- 
vasions of the conquering Nahua tribes^ when their 
methods of rule, their gods and their kings were 
forced upon the conquered peoples age after age, 

1 Cf. "The People of Mexico," Book I, chapter i, for an outline 
of the Indian history of Mexico. 

238 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

down to the phenomenon of the spread of European 
sociahsm among the Mexicans of to-day, Mexico 
has ever been a borrower of government and 
pohtical systems from outside herself. In all that 
long history of more than two thousand years, we 
look in vain for even a spark of desire for or the 
shghtest attempt to apply the people's own remedies 
to their own pohtical ills. 

Passing over the Indian invasions and their com- 
plete upturning of social, pohtical and religious sys- 
tems at frequent intervals, we come to the glowing 
example of Spain, which in her three centuries of 
rule forced down upon the Indians the government 
and the rehgion as well as the language of the 
Iberian conquerors. The success of the rehgion, 
at least, was proof of but one thing, and that was 
not the all-conquering universality of the Church 
of Rome, but rather the docihty and adaptability 
of the Indians. The whole system of the laws and 
usages of Mexico, as we have seen above, came from 
outside herself, direct and practically unchanged 
from the Spanish provinces. This Spanish sys- 
tem lasted for so long and was so thoroughly en- 
forced that it seems indeed as if it had become part 
and parcel of the very hfe of the country. It per- 
sisted through many revolutions and through the 
peace of Diaz, but as we look back on it in the 
hght of the reversion to Indianism which seems to 
be gripping the country in recent years, we have a 
new reahzation of the instabihty of the Spanish 
as well as of all the later grafts upon the parent 
stem of Indianism. 

239 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

For the grafting did not end with the fall of 
Spanish rule. Almost at once there began a new 
borrowing of ideas. The uprising of the Indians 
under Hidalgo in 1810 was rather against all the 
whites than merely against Spain. But Indian in- 
competence let the banner fall from its loose grip, 
and it was not until 1823 that the real independence 
was achieved. And by what and by whom? 
By the spirit of the '^ Rights of Man", borrowed 
from France and the United States and carried by 
the native-born whites or Creoles of Mexico. Like 
the native-born whites of the present United States, 
they decided that they, too, were as good as the 
Europeans, and so wrote their Declaration of In- 
dependence. Borrowed, all of it, a rebellion steeped 
in the blood of the white men and not in the soil 
of Mexico. 

But their '^ rights of man" were short-lived, and 
soon they were inviting Ferdinand VII of Spain to 
rule over Mexico, in his exile from Madrid. The 
royal idea was thus implanted, and a Mexican 
Creole, Agustin Iturbide, crowned himself emperor. 
Afterward the republic again, and with it, after 
many vicissitudes, a new constitution, borrowed, 
practically complete, from the constitution of the 
new United States of America. Mexico, whose 
hope was in her entity, formed herself into a federal 
repubhc, with sovereign States — ^where no States 
had existed — because, forsooth, the United States 
was making a fine go of it, and success is contagious. 
Sight was lost entirely of the fact that the Federal 
repubhc of the United States was the result of the 

240 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

only possible form of union that could be devised 
between thirteen rebelluig colonies, each of which 
had been ahnost as distinct, governmentally, as 
were Mexico and Cuba and Florida and Peru, the 
independent Spanish colonies. 

Briefly, once more, the sequence of the republican 
borrowing was halted, while Maximilian, brought 
from Austria to save Mexico for the Conservatives, 
appeared with his borrowed European court and 
his shiploads of silver plate and royal carriages, to 
rule as Mexico's second emperor. On his death the 
repubhcan system resumed its interrupted way, — 
empires were not successful, and therefore not 
worth imitating. 

Along with Mexico's imitation of the federal form 
of government went a dozen othpr imitations of 
the American constitution. All of these have had 
but one net result in Mexican history since the 
adoption of the Constitution of 1857, — the Uving 
of a political lie, for Mexico has never, since that 
day, lived up to more than the most casual literal- 
ness of that document. She has been governed, 
whenever she had peace, by a despot sitting in the 
central power and appointing the supposedly elec- 
tive governors and all their staffs. She has been 
judged, when she has had justice, by a despot dic- 
tating the major principles of law and such detailed 
decisions as were of national or pohtical importance. 
She has had elections with ''free and unlimited 
suffrage" which have been hopeless farces, as they 
must inevitably be in a population whose illiteracy 
is, by the best estimates, at least ninety per cent. 

241 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Hardly a provision of the beautiful Anglo-Saxon 
constitution has been lived up to, when Mexico 
has been at peace. And when she has been in revo- 
lution, the sacred document has been used only as 
a battle flag. 

But all this does not lead, as one might expect, 
to a justification of the newer constitution, that of 
1917. For that is a document even less adapted 
than its predecessor to Mexico's needs. The Con- 
stitution of 1857 sought, at least, to meet Mexico's 
larger problems and was capable of revision and 
amendment. The Constitution of 1917, while it 
contains pages of repetitions from the older docu- 
ment has virtually nullified them by other sections. 
In its most vital articles, such as those confiscating 
private property, providing special labor legislation, 
etc., the inspiration was never the need of Mexico, 
but the idea of the foreign radicals or the foreign- 
trained Mexican radicals who dominated the con- 
stitutional convention and drove its illiterate mem- 
bers wherever they willed. The only factor of 
Mexican psychology which these special ''new" 
and ''advanced" sections feed is that of cupidity 
and vengeance, and those are qualities not essen- 
tially Mexican, and certainly hardly vital to the 
regeneration of the country. 

So these have been the curtains, borrowed all of 
them from other lands and other races, behind which 
the psychological drama of true Mexican govern- 
ment and politics has been played out. Always 
there has been but one chief object, the appearance 
of progress, never the simple object of being really 

242 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

peaceful and progressive and helpful to the unfortu- 
nate of the land. Never, moreover, has it earnestly 
sought to achieve that high place in the eyes of the 
world to which the Mexicans lay such elaborate 
claim. 

The result has been and is to-day this disparity 
between the written constitution and the true char- 
acteristics of the Mexican people. From the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century, Mexico has sought 
to appear before the world as a ''democratic" 
nation. Yet in all that period there has probably 
been not one government which has actually been 
so, with the possible exception of that of Madero 
at the very beginning of its brief life, a condition 
which can be credited largely to the fact that it 
was then using the inherited political machinery of 
Diaz, directed toward democratic ends. 

Up to the time of Diaz there had been seventy- 
two governments since the first rebellion against 
Spain, and virtually all these had been merely de 
facto organizations controling sections of the coun- 
try; only twelve had legal recognition, and the 
others were, as a Mexican revolutionist has re- 
marked, ''grotesque tyrannies and shameless usur- 
pations." During the hundred years of independ- 
ence there have been about eight hundred revolu- 
tions, but only three of them have been national 
in their scope, — that begun by Hidalgo; that of 
Juarez, and that of Madero. 

Yet revolution has been the great manifestation 
of political activity in Mexico. This is unquestion- 
able, for in all her history no political party or 

243 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

faction has come to power by any means but 
revolution. Whenever there has been change of 
government by election, it has been because it was 
desirable, in the eyes of those in control, to put 
some one else in office, — the great example is of 
course the four years 'interregnum" of Gonzales 
between Diaz's first and second terms. 

Indeed this custom of revolution as a political 
activity also has its roots in the imitation of foreign 
forms. It is literally true that from the pre- 
Diaz revolutions down to those of the recent past, 
the justification offered for the excesses and the 
horrors which have accompanied them (and for their 
very existence, in fact) has been the French Revolu- 
tion. The defenders of the Carranza movement, 
for example, echo their masters of a generation 
before in that "no social progress has ever been 
achieved save by revolution." They forget, as the 
student quoted above ^ has expressed it, that the 
French Revolution was to establish rights given long 
before and not to overturn a system, that no 
progress was achieved by the French Revolution, but 
only in the periods of peace which finally succeeded 
it. He says later that, in seeking to achieve in- 
stitutions similar to, or greater than those of the 
United States, Mexico has ''spilt more blood than 
the sweat which would have served to cultivate 
her most fertile lands; and in order to have the 
satisfaction of imitating the French Revolution and 
of saying that there is being reahzed in this country 
the most advanced theories of contemporary 

^ Toribio Esquivel Obregon, op. cit., pages 110, 113. 
244 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

socialism, the whole people has been cast into tor- 
ment and reduced to misery." 

Posing under the shadow of the forms of democ- 
racy, Mexico has carried on her politics without 
even the salutary influence of a strong opposition 
party. Always a faction has been in full control 
not only of the machinery of government but of the 
machinery of "election", and death has been the 
penalty of the opposition which in genuinely demo- 
cratic lands would have either disappeared into 
quiet and decent retirement or survived in thor- 
oughly healthy attacks on the successful govern- 
ment. Even in the period of revolution prior to 
Diaz, when Conservatives and Liberals switched 
places with bewildering frequency (but always as a 
result of revolution), there was no true political 
hfe, for each was either completely in power or 
completely out of power, and the ''opposition" 
existed only in hunted armies of "bandits." 

A more recent example brings the situation close 
to us. After Madero had established his govern- 
ment, a promising opposition apparently arose in 
the Catholic party in Congress, but this party was 
so suddenly and completely destroyed through the 
machinations of Gustavo Madero that its single 
attempt at a safe and sane opposition was com- 
pletely quashed. When Francisco de la Barra, 
former ad interim president of the republic and the 
recognized leader of the Catholic party, was about 
to return from Paris to Mexico in 1912, he received 
a cablegram from the "Circle of Friends of Fran- 
cisco Madero" warning him that if he came to 

245 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Mexico to establish himself, as he planned, as a 
leader of the Catholic opposition party in Con- 
gress, he would do so ''at his own peril and at the 
peril of the Mexican nation." De la Barra had no 
intention of attempting in any way to organize a 
revolution, and it is doubtful if he then had any 
ambitions for the presidency, but his plan to organ- 
ize the Catholic party as a healthy opposition to 
the government was regarded in Mexico as at its 
mildest a tentative attempt to "discredit" the 
Madero regime.^ 

As this is written, the government of Obregon, 
tottering in its niche, has no true opposition in 
Congress or in the political life of the country. 
Those who oppose him are regarded darkly as trai- 
tors by his supporters and as patriots by his enemies. 
This is the case whether the opposition be from con- 
gressmen, whose lives are at stake (as the assassina- 
tion of the opposition by Huerta amply proved), 
or from political opponents who wait on the border 
to form armies to overthrow him or who are even 
now in the field against him. It is a condition 
frankly recognized by the Mexicans, and no one 
thinks, to-day, of upsetting Obregon's policies 
save by threat of revolution or by the pressure of 
possible foreign intervention. 

All of which tends to demonstrate only the utter 
inability of the Mexican mind to function in a 

^ The author was in Paris at the time, was in the apartments 
of Mr. de la Barra in the Hotel Regina when the cablegram was 
received, and listened to the discussion which finally resulted 
in Mr. de la Barra's returning to Mexico by way of Washington. 

246 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

democracy. The very system of State divisions in 
Mexico (now long enough estabhshed to have be- 
come an accepted fact of the national life) has had, 
as its primary result, the simphfication of the system 
of revolutions as political expedients. A governor or 
a local celebrity can more easily work his will in a 
recognized political area hke a State than in a 
unified nation. The fact that Mexican revolutions 
invariably start in single States, and that the pres- 
ent government is, as we have seen, virtually a 
confederation of tribal chieftains, makes the State 
system a continued invitation to national suicide. 
The Mexicans themselves trace the loss of Texas 
to the false idea of State entities and this was cer- 
tainly a contributing factor to the secession. But 
the most interesting corollary is that when a tribal 
chieftain reaches the supreme power, as Obregon 
has reached it and as Diaz reached it before him, 
his first and his lasting effort is to destroy, in 
actuality, the sense of separateness which gave him 
his first opportunity and which he knows well will 
give another opportunity to a later rival. But none, 
not even Carranza in his new constitution, dared 
eliminate the federal system, — it means too much 
to the caciques or chieftains to whom, in the last 
analysis, the ruler must look for support. 

The ability of the Mexican to assimilate de- 
mocracy was discussed by Madero in his famous 
book on the ''Presidential Succession", where he 
wrote that ''while it is perhaps true that eighty- 
four per cent, of the people are handled at will by 

the government and the Clergy", his observation of 

247 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

the meetings held in Nuevo Leon, Yucatan and 
Coahuila proved that '^our people are generally in- 
clined to follow those who are more to their liking." 
The tragedy with which Madero was betrayed was 
a ghastly awakening to any who shared his belief 
in the ability of the eighty-four per cent, of Mexico 
to enjoy democracy. 

Here, however, we touch a deeper phase of the 
problem, the utter unreliabihty of the Mexican in 
facing his political obligations. The fact that he 
elected Madero and then went back to his fields 
and forgot about him; that in the next turn of 
events he agreed to fight for another leader who 
promised him everything that Madero had not yet 
given him are the truest indications of the Mexican 
attitude toward politics as a personal game where 
there is all privilege and no obligation. 

This apathy is the accumulated result of years of 
misunderstanding and tyranny, and only years of 
appreciation and education can eradicate it. The 
regime which marked the Spanish time with the 
Church, the nobles, and the landholders as virtually 
kings in their realms made of the Indian a cautious 
soul to whom the power of his masters was so omni- 
present that he learned to look only to the hand 
that fed him and seldom beyond it. Thus, when 
anyone asks the Indian who is the President of 
Mexico, he replies, "Quien sahef or will even re- 
peat the name of the president of his Httle village. 

Only one power in Mexico seems capable, time 
after time, of rousing the Indian out of his apathy, — 
politically as well as religiously. This power is the 

248 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

Roman Catholic Church. The virihty and ability 
of recovery of the Catholic Church needs no com- 
ment here, but it is perhaps of value to suggest the 
chief local reason for its permanence under perse- 
cution in Mexico and to cite examples of its very 
virile strength in the political life of the country. 
Throughout all the periods of Mexican revolution 
it has been the Church, and the Church often abso- 
lutely alone, which has kept the fires of national 
conservative patriotism burning; and stable Mexi- 
cans, even though not Catholics, have always 
turned to it as the first and the last sure control of 
the passions of the populace. 

The power of the Church may therefore be said 
never to have been truly eclipsed. Two or three 
instances since Diaz seem to substantiate this. 
After Madero's accession the returns of "the first 
free election Mexico ever had" undoubtedly showed 
a vast number of Catholic candidates chosen for 
congress and other offices, — a choice which was 
promptly vitiated by official action. Toward the 
end of his rule Carranza was frankly fearful of the 
political power of the Church, and the steady devel- 
opments of Mexican politics since that time indi- 
cate a growing power of the CathoUc element 
(whether directed by the hierarchy or not is unim- 
portant) as a possible stabiHzing factor in Mexican 
pohtics. These conditions are of themselves sig- 
nificant of the recognition by the politicians of the 
power which the Church, directly or indirectly, 
exercises over the vast body of ignorant population 
existing in Mexico. The Catholics have always con- 

249 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

tended that in the larger sense this churchly influ- 
ence was for good, even though in details it might 
seem selfish and shortsighted. This carries us again 
into the larger question of the nature of politics in 
Mexico, where the unthinking mass must always 
be led either by the Church or by the demagogues; 
the point of much discussion being whether the 
priest, the politician or the soldier is the better 
guide. 

The pity of it is that, needing this leadership so 
badly, the Mexican is forced, by the very conditions 
of his history and of his psychology, into taking 
always the worst leaders, seeking out always the 
poorest guides and the most heartless exploiters of 
all that means anything to his body or his soul. 
This is the tragedy of group life everywhere, but 
in Mexico the tragedy reaches the proportions of a 
holocaust. In Mexico there are almost no pubUc 
men. There are orators and lawyers and philoso- 
phers, but the much berated yet thoroughly useful 
politician does not exist. There is no opportunity, no 
scheme of reward for the '^ district workers", for 
those simple and industrious leaders of the mass who 
make Anglo-Saxon politics at once the most human 
and the most workable of democratic instruments. 
Nothing brings Mexican politics ''down to earth", 
and it sails in a heaven of priestly exhortations or 
idealistic oratory, or wallows in the blood and mire 
of revolution and graft; there is nothing between. 
Hear the plea, for Mexican politics and the Mexican 
people, of one who burns with the intense honesty 

of his purpose: 

250 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

We live in complete delirium, the work of the unhealthy- 
literature which devastates our brains and the seclusion in 
which we are held forever, far from the political realities. 
To the world we seem criminals; but we are not, for we are 
only a poor organism obsessed by the most cruel suffering, 
racked by the blackest of nightmares, stripped of wisdom 
and stripped of power to control the convulsions of its malady; 
but dreaming, in its nakedness and impotence, of reaching 
the summit of humanity, of realizing the as yet unrealized 
dream of human equality, of setting the world aright. But 
if we are fortunate, the day will come when the calamity 
which fate brings to all dreamers will bring us the cure, which 
at rare times is the end of delirium; then it will appear that 
our soul is formed of the same wings as that of Alfonso Quijano 
the Good.i 

A hope, indeed, and perhaps a true one. But 
behind the hope, and wrapped up inexorably with 
its development, is the basic conception of the 
attitude toward the State and the government. 
This, in all the turbulence of its manifestations, 
must after all be the basis of both political thinking 
and group morality. The unanimity of the Mexican 
group-mind is nowhere more patent. Individual- 
istic as the Mexican is in every class, he regards the 
law as something devised as a protection for him- 
self at the same time that he regards himself as 
above the law. Mexican justice in the administra- 
tion of laws is not the cold, impersonal force which 
we of Anglo-Saxon mind have come to beheve is 
the only form which justice can take. The lawyer 
before the Mexican court seeks the friendship of 
the judge and discusses the case with him person- 
ally. The judge in his turn promises that ''justice 

1 Toribio Esquivel Obregon, op cit., page 121. 
251 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

will be done", and that justice is actually done in 
thousands of cases is testified over and over again 
by all who dealt with Mexican courts in the days of 
Diaz. This has nothing to do with any graft or 
bribery in the judicial function. The notorious 
fact that the courts were under the domination of 
the executive, even in the time of Diaz, did not 
mean that they were corruptible; it merely meant 
what Diaz himself stated, — that the ''higher 
justice" which hung upon no evidence and could 
not be defined in court could be executed best from 
the sanctum of the dictator. The "dishonest" 
courts of Mexican were at that time a manifestation 
not of bribes but a state of mind of the Mexican 
himself. 

Honesty and justice are relative matters. Courts 
of absolute justice in Mexico would not only be 
startling to the natives, but would probably be 
considered cruel and heartless beyond belief, al- 
though Mexicans do recognize the possibility of an 
abstract justice beyond what has been dispensed 
by Mexican courts since Diaz departed. The 
Mexicans have a growing respect for American and 
English law and enforcement of law, but although 
they voice a hope that some day Mexico may 
furnish similar justice, it is doubtful if its impersonal 
application would be immediately popular. 

The Mexican will have to travel a long way 
before he will reach the point where he can under- 
stand an American or English judge deciding against 
a personal friend in a mere matter of judicial inter- 
pretation. The average Mexican, for instance, wiU 

262 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

find nothing out of the ordinary in the incident 
cited by Doctor Esquivel Obregon, where when 
three cases against three different individuals came 
up for decision, on identical evidence (for the 
matter all dealt with a single incident) the Supreme 
Court of the nation decided one of the cases unani- 
mously for the plaintiff, the second unanimously 
for the defendant, and the third for the plaintiff 
by a majority vote, — and the briefs were identical, 
save for the difference in the names of the de- 
fendants. ^ 

The attitude of the office-holder is a most illum- 
inating phase of the Mexican relationship to the 
State. Gustave Le Bon wrote that ''in general 
and fundamentally the pohtical problem of the 
Latin- American demoracies is the problem of public 
thieving." In this is summed up the essence of the 
Mexican attitude toward political office, itself an 
unanswerable charge against Mexican "democ- 
racy." A Mexican official seldom considers a pub- 
lic office as a pubhc trust. A prosperous class of 
citizens has been built up in the lesser bureaucrats 
upon the tacit understanding that the pubUc office 
can be used as an opportunity to steal and to graft. 
The ''milking" of pubhc office and of those who 
must deal with such an office has long been an art 
in Mexico, and before and since Diaz has been the 
most flagrant of government abuses. Under the 
Porfirian regime it also existed, but was of a thor- 
oughly "legitimate" order. A lawyer, for instance, 
would give a present of twenty pesos to an em- 

1 Toribio Esquivel Obregon, op cit., page 185. 
253 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

ployee of a department to place papers in which the 
lawyer was interested at the top of the pile of 
matter which was to come to the minister's atten- 
tion. This payment would not be considered by 
either the clerk or the lawyer as any form of graft. 
The giving of commissions to purchasing agents 
and influential persons by dealers in Mexico was 
common during the Diaz regime, and is of course 
to-day abused beyond all description. Yet ef- 
forts to bribe high Mexican officials would almost 
invariably (under Diaz) be the source of immense 
discomfiture for those who attempted it. 

Petty grafting by minor ofiicials has been com- 
mon in Mexico through her entire history. It is 
recorded that when the Mexican Railway was con- 
structed in the 70 's, labor was contracted from the 
mayor of a village, who was paid seventy-five 
centavos a day, per man. To the men whom he 
furnished he paid but thirty-seven and one-half 
centavos a day, pocketing the balance, but when 
the workmen were informed of this and were told 
that they could receive the full pay by being em- 
ployed directly, they preferred to continue under 
the protection of their chief. 

Graft as a perquisite of position is thus a funda- 
mental tenet of Mexican psychology. The dis- 
tinction between opportunity in personal affairs 
and in public office is, however, fairly sharp. A 
Mexican may be above taking graft in private 
business, but a government position is to him 
distinctly an opportunity for thievery from the 
government and from those who deal with govern- 

254 



THE CAULDRON OF POLITICS 

ment and is embraced as such and no questions 
asked. 

Group morality, in such cases, is distinctly below 
the average of private morality, as we have seen. 
There is widespread graft in Mexico to-day, but 
chiefly it has to do with government, and where the 
very lifeblood of the government is to-day poured 
almost openly into the waiting cups of those in 
power, private morality, in business and in in- 
dividual relationships, is still relatively good. The 
astonishing facts of Mexican government graft 
hardly enter into the present discussion, but the 
cycle of the past twelve years is not without its 
very great significance on the psychological side. 
Under General Diaz, some graft was paid, as has 
been noted, but to-day the collection of toll for 
every act and the extraction of commissions, in 
cash or in kind, and with or without the knowledge 
of the payer and with or without any return to him, 
absolutely engulfs the country. 

The peace of Obregon during the first months of 
his office — that peace which so reassured the world 
outside — ^was bought at a price of millions of pesos 
paid in outright tribute to Villa and men of his 
type. The government of Carranza, before Obregon, 
existed solely on the strength of his willingness to 
let his generals take what they would, and the 
padded pay rolls of the army (a minor form of 
graft even in the time of Diaz) were the laughing- 
stock of the ever-ready wits of the Mexican capital. 
It was said, and probably with truth, that Carranza 
fell because his presentation of a civilian candidate 

255 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

for president was taken by his generals as an indi- 
cation that he intended to divert some of the graft 
to unmihtary channels. 

The pity of it all is that perhaps Carranza — per- 
haps also Obregon — followed these tactics with a 
sincere desire to do the best thing for their coun- 
try and for their people. Steeped in immorality, 
with the breaking of public faith the chief tenet of 
the pohtical creed, with loot as the end of nine- 
tenths of the ''revolutionary" outbreaks which are 
Mexican ''politics", the whole panorama of Mexican 
group life is marked with the hideous taint of out- 
raged pubhc trust. No wonder the cry goes up from 
all who look closely at Mexican questions: How 
can we hope to see a rebirth of personal morality in 
a people who for almost the whole of one of their 
brief generations have seen in their leaders and* in 
their natural teachers the most colossal outrag- 
ing of all the principles of morality and race 
advancement? 

The only hope seems to be in looking at the past, 
and that hope is still dim. Diaz lifted his country 
and his people a Httle way out of a slough that was 
similar, in essence, to this present wallow of savage 
passion. Is there another Diaz, or is there indeed 
a newer era dawning when the group can look within 
and to its lesser leaders, when Mexico's cry through 
aU the years shall be for a principle, and not for a 
man? 



256 



CHAPTER XI 

MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

FOR nearly all the hundred years of their inde- 
pendence, the Mexicans have regarded subju- 
gation to the United States as their country's ulti- 
mate destiny. Whatever may be our own ideas 
about the matter, however preposterous the idea 
may be to many of us, or however desirable, indeed, 
it may seem to others, the fact remains that this 
is the unquahfied Mexican conviction. They ground 
it upon the history of American relations with their 
country and upon their behef that the destiny of 
the United States itself is driving it, whether its 
individual citizens will it or not, toward such an end. 
The whole attitude of Mexico and the Mexicans 
toward foreigners is colored and confused by two 
vital psychological facts. One is this group-fear of 
foreign intervention, which is at the basis alike of 
all the good behavior of Mexican governments and 
of all their bombastic and embarrassing assertions 
of ''national pride." The other is the Mexican's 
individual appreciation of the personal qualities of 
foreigners and the shrewd realization that under 
foreigners they and their country have the greatest 
opportunity for prosperity and advancement. To- 
day the group-fear is uppermost and dominates the 

257 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

individual attitude; but the friendly feeling still 
exists deep in the Mexican mind. This takes from 
the temporary manifestations of the present much 
of their menace and promises much good in the 
future, not only for foreigners but for Mexico's own 
people as well. 

The fear of foreign interference in Mexican affairs 
goes through all the country's history. The Mexi- 
can-American war of 1847-1849, with its loss to 
Mexico of its fairest provinces — the great empire 
of Texas, the precious fields and mountains of 
Arizona, New Mexico and California — has never 
been forgotten. The smoldering grudge over those 
losses was easily fanned to flame in the popular 
mind by Carranza's skillful anti-American propa- 
ganda during the Great War of 1914-19. 

Besides this actual invasion of Mexican terri- 
tory, with its tragic losses to Mexico, the United 
States has been very close to intervention in Mex- 
ican affairs at least four times in the independent 
history of that country. The question of claims, 
which gave the Texans, indeed, their first excuse 
to comply with American requests and on this 
ground (among others) to secede from Mexico, 
almost brought on a war previous to that of 1847. 
The Treaty of Guadalupe which ended the Mexican- 
American war settled that moot point only by 
providing that the United States should take over 
the payment of the balance of the claims of Ameri- 
can citizens for border raids, Mexico having paid 
only a tenth of the two million dollars which the 
claims commissions of 1840 had allowed. 

258 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

Perhaps as near an approach to actual Ameri- 
can intervention in the private poHtical affairs of 
Mexico as ever failed to materialize came just at 
the close of the American Civil War in 1865. 
When Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the Union 
had a trained army of close to half a million vet- 
erans, the greatest body of fighting men in the 
world. For two years the French had been sup- 
porting with money and with an army the puppet 
of Napoleon III in Mexico, the Emperor Maxi- 
milian. After the fall of the Confederacy, Wash- 
ington, ready to consider the Mexican situation, as 
it had not been before, demanded the withdrawal 
of the French troops. 

Napoleon III retired his armies from Mexico 
immediately following the coUapse of the Con- 
federacy in the United States, but Maximilian con- 
tinued to rule, supported by some Mexicans and a 
horde of mercenaries and adventurers. From 
Texas a handful of Confederate soldiers crossed 
into Mexico, vowing they would never lay down 
their arms. They offered their trained swords to 
Maximilian, and fought for two years for him. 
They presented themselves as the vanguard of 
another army, second only to that of the United 
States, the army of the Confederacy. Had Na- 
poleon chosen to allow Maximilian more ''mer- 
cenaries", or had the continuance of the empire 
and Mexican civil war seemed possible ^with the 
means at Maximilian's disposal, the United States 
would have been forced to throw its armies across 
the border. General Kirby-Smith, the great Con- 

259 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

federate cavalry officer, was in Texas and Louis- 
iana, ready to lead the Confederate hosts into 
Mexico and to fight the American Civil War over 
again on Mexican soil. Juarez was then, as Car- 
ranza was nearly fifty years later, the pet of Wash- 
ington, and the Mexicans feared then as now that 
intervention meant annexation. Napoleon's with- 
drawal first, and Maximilian's financial inability 
to handle the Confederate hosts which waited for 
his word saved Mexico at that time from the action 
which the imperialists and the republicans feared 
equally. 

The next occasion when American intervention 
was inmainent was during Grant's administration. 
Juarez, after his term in the presidency, was dead, 
and Diaz, who now was in the saddle, seemed only 
a bandit Indian chieftain, with Mexico seething 
around him in an endless series of civil wars and 
''revolutions" of which the present era is an almost 
exact replica. American rights (chiefly along the 
border) were being trampled upon in the again 
familiar fashion, and the question of intervention 
was considered seriously in Washington. The dis- 
cussion took in every phase of the problem, includ- 
ing its difficulties and obligations, with an eye on 
a people in the United States who were sick of 
war, but were led by a cabinet and statesmen 
nearly all of whom had been soldiers. The result 
was a virtual decision to move forward, if that were 
necessary, and the notes which were forwarded to 
Diaz were backed — ^and bore the stamp of it in 
their language — by this firm decision. Only Diaz's 

260 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

personal success and the establishment of his sub- 
stantial government solved the question without 
outside interference. The documents relating to 
this remarkable situation are in the archives in 
Washington. They show how the very willingness 
to proceed with intervention was then (as it has 
been ever since) the surest and shortest road to the 
avoidance of the need of intervention. 

A few years later, under President Hayes, the 
famous Evarts note to Diaz, while it probably did 
not presage actual intervention, was couched in 
terms which hinted at the likelihood that the 
United States would take a hand in Mexican affairs 
if necessary, — and the peace of Diaz was definitely 
founded upon the dictator's wise use of this docu- 
ment as the basis of his ''phantom of American 
intervention." 

The incidents of the Wilson administration in 
Washington are more recent. The Pershing ex- 
pedition into northern Mexico to capture Villa 
after the raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, 
merely verged on intervention, but the occupation 
of Vera Cruz in 1914 was literally the first step in 
such an invasion. This move was clothed in terms 
of an attack on a single man, President Huerta, 
but it confirmed to the Mexican mind once more 
the conviction that the United States leaned always 
to the idea of intervention and was then restrained 
only by fear, either of Mexico's own national 
prowess, or of the international consequences. A 
week after the withdrawal of the American troops 
from Vera Cruz the talk of intervention was 

261 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

stronger in Washington than it had been during the 
occupation, and the actual move was held off more 
because President Wilson viewed all war with hor- 
ror than because the situation did not justify 
action. The refusal then to be willing, as Grant 
was willing, to intervene if conditions did not 
improve is apparently at the root of the unrest and 
the difficulties which have followed. 

The Wilson intervention policy was largely one 
of drifting, carrying with it little of the force which 
direct threats had had in the earlier administrations. 
Under his predecessors, an imminence of inter- 
vention had such a profound psychological effect on 
the Mexicans as to remove, almost forthwith, the 
causes for American action; under Wilson the 
American government displayed a weakness, a 
negative attitude toward Mexico, which convinced 
the Mexicans that intervention could be avoided 
by merely bluffing it off. It shaped their foreign 
policy indeed, but it shaped it away from the old 
system of prompt compliance and toward the 
deliberate adoption of innuendo and insult as the 
means of escape. It changed their concept of the 
United States from that of the mastiff which had 
formerly held undisputed sway into that of an 
equally massive canine whose teeth — and insides — ■ 
were one or both missing. 

In either form, however, the idea of American 
intervention has had a profound psychological in- 
fluence on Mexican diplomacy and indeed on 
Mexican internal politics. The ''phantom of in- 
tervention" was said, in the time of Diaz, to be a 

262 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

figment of the imagination of that ruler. It was 
whispered in Mexico — and the ordinary Mexicans 
beheved it to a man — that Diaz held his place 
because he bowed so willingly to American 
ideas and at the same time fostered throughout 
Mexico the idea that intervention was sure to fol- 
low his overthrow. To-day one hears this theory 
everywhere, when Diaz is discussed, and many of 
his old supporters hold that Diaz himself so beheved 
in the ''specter" that he fled from his country and 
gave it over to the Madero revolution because he 
believed that if he fought for his place, his action 
would inevitably bring on American invasion and 
destruction to Mexico. 

Indeed, the ideas of American "destiny" and 
predatory intent toward Mexico were to be found 
throughout the circles of government in those days, 
just as they are to-day. Those astute aristocrats 
of the Diaz time had figured out elaborately, and 
to their own satisfaction, the history of "imperial- 
ism" of the United States. They knew the why of 
all the expansions of their northern neighbor and 
explained them all in terms of predatory national- 
ism, — which was ultimately to take in Mexico 
along with Louisiana, Oregon, Texas, California, 
New Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines and 
Porto Rico. 

Fifteen years ago there died in Mexico City a 
little old man, with long black hair and a white 
mustache and imperial. His name was Ignacio 
Mariscal. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs 
under President Diaz. With him perhaps died Diaz, 

263 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

for not only had the counsel of Ignacio Mariscal 
helped to keep Diaz close to the source of his power, 
the simple peons who worshipped him and who 
could always see the president and discuss with 
him their complaints against his predatory under- 
lings, but it had kept Diaz clear, too, in his vision 
toward the outside world. Mariscal, of pure 
Spanish descent, but for generations a Mexican, 
knew that outside world as well as he knew Mex- 
ico. His administration of the foreign office has 
been criticized as "easy" on the ground that he 
merely ''did what Washington told him to do", 
but it is interesting to compare the facts and to 
realize that it was abroad and not in Mexico that 
Finance Minister Limantour funded the old Mex- 
ican debt, paid it and floated Mexican government 
bonds on a four-per-cent. basis. It was from 
abroad that the capital which developed Mexico 
into a modern State poured in. And Mariscal con- 
trolled Mexico's foreign policy. His recipe may 
have been simple, but it was successful. 

The Mariscal policy was based primarily on this 
same principle of American intervention. Mariscal 
may not have believed that any American govern- 
ment or any generation of the American people 
desired or dreamed of intervention, but he certainly 
believed that the frank fear of it and respect for the 
United States should be and were the bases of the 
foreign policy of Mexico, It may well be that 
knowing his people as he did he realized the 
psychological effect of the fear of that intervention. 
He himself was not without a firm belief in some 

264 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

phases of it, chiefly the American destiny which 
Mexicans feel will some day bring their country 
under the shadow of the Stars and Strips. One 
story of that belief will suffice. 

On the second of May, 1898, Mariscal was 
walking, as he did every morning, in the beautiful 
Alameda of Mexico City. A friend, the editor of 
an American newspaper in Mexico City, greeted 
him. The news of Dewey's victory in Manila Bay 
was on every tongue, and discussion was inevitable. 
Soon Mariscal said very quietly that of course the 
United States would annex the Philippines. The 
protest from the American was vehement, — most 
Americans in Mexico in that time were kept busy 
disclaiming the Mexican accusations of their 
nation's predatory designs on Cuba. 

''Ah, yes," Mariscal interrupted him, nodding 
his head sagely and confidently. ''Not Cuba, no. 
But the Philippines, yes. You shall see." 

Then the smile faded and the little black eyes 
looked off down the shaded gravel path. 

"Yes, and we are happy here in Mexico that it 
has happened so," he concluded. "For now your 
country will have its hands so busy for many years 
that it will not have time to think of taking Mexico." 

The astute old Creole aristocrat spoke sincerely, 
and the event proved the truth of his prediction as 
regards the Philippines. But he presented in con- 
crete words on a definite occasion the thought that 
was then as it is to this day uppermost in the minds 
of Mexican leaders when they think of the United 
States. 

265 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

This concentration of attention on the great 
northern neighbor brings in another psychological 
factor of Mexican diplomacy. This is the Monroe 
Doctrine. Even though they do not hke this clearly 
enunciated pohcy of the American nation, Mexican 
governments from the days of President Monroe 
himself down to the present have hidden themselves 
behind its protecting wings. For all its distasteful 
qualities, which make its support something of a 
bitter pill to the ''proud Latin States" of the West- 
ern hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine has resulted 
in making all Mexican diplomacy in Europe rather 
a matter of gold braid than of real work. Of late, 
however, it has had yet another facet. 

It is to be remembered that this cornerstone of 
American diplomacy was enunciated originally as a 
warning to European powers that any attempt to 
extend their territorial possessions at the expense 
of any sovereign State in the Western hemisphere 
would be considered a threat against the sovereignty 
of the United States. Its development through vari- 
ous stages reached, before President Wilson's time, 
to what the Latin-Americans have described as the 
assumption by the United States of the r61e of 
"Continental Policeman." Under Carranza the 
Mexican conviction that the predatory ideals of the 
United States were demonstrated in this new Mon- 
roe Doctrine was cleverly disseminated throughout 
the Western world, and the "Carranza Doctrine", 
which held that no foreign State, no matter what 
its power, had a right to dictate the policies of 
smaller States, was offered as a counteracting force. 

266 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

During the Great War Carranza's propaganda 
was carried on, probably with German money, 
throughout Latin-America, and the crop of anti- 
American laws which followed everywhere may be 
traced largely to it. The success of Carranza in 
tweaking the eagle's tail and getting away with his 
Hfe, and with official recognition from Washington 
into the bargain, added to the popularity of the 
idea if not of the name of the ''Carranza Doctrine." 
President Wilson's own enunciation of the coming 
displacement of the Monroe Doctrine with some 
form of ''Pan- Americanism" had its influence as 
well. 

If, imder Obregon, that feeling of the Carranza 
period has been covered with greater tact and dis- 
played with less bombast, this hardly means that 
it had been forgotten. Mexicans still point signifi- 
cantly to the fact that Cuba has not been allowed 
to elect its ex-bandits to the presidential chair; that 
Haiti is forced to spend her income for roads and 
schools, despite her expressed wish to spend it for 
the personal aggrandizement of her leaders; and 
that Nicaragua frets under the "tyrranous" inter- 
vention of American marines when she would 
much prefer to be enjoying her erstwhile revolu- 
tions. 

Wliatever may be the facts of the American atti- 
tude or of the American destiny, for that matter, 
the conviction remains in the Mexican mind, and 
particularly in the Mexican group-mind, that the 
eyes of the "Colossus of the North", of the "Blond 

Octopus", are on their country. The whole weight 

267 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

of Mexican policy is directed toward the avoidance 
of intervention. Thus when the threat is definite 
and the danger presses, there is inevitably prompt 
compliance with the orders of the ''predatory police- 
man" of the Continent; the behavior of Maxi- 
milian and of Diaz were the instinctive Mexican 
pohcy. When, on the other hand, the threatening 
force of the United States is asleep or distracted 
from the idea which the Mexicans regard as an 
obsession, the activity of wily Latin-Indian diplo- 
mats is directed toward keeping that attention in 
its state of distraction. Hence all the endless round 
of subterfuges and hecklings, — Jove is dozing, and 
if he wakes with his attention on flies, he will not 
soon think of putting on his armor. So the Mexican 
reasons, and in such wise we must watch his reason- 
ing, or we, too, will lose sight of the main issue, 
just as he intends that we shall. 

These are the outstanding manifestations of that 
sense of inferiority which masquerades under the 
name of Mexican "national pride", proclaiming it- 
self in the childishness of its extreme sensitiveness 
to its position in the eyes of its accepted superiors. 
Under Diaz there was a true appearance of manly 
self-respect and wilhngness to meet the world on 
its own terms; since that era, it has become in- 
creasingly impossible for any nation in the world to 
make any diplomatic representations to the Mexican 
government without this reiterated, childish pride 
bobbing up in the midst of all discussions. The 
whole nature of the Mexican revolutions which have 
followed each other since 1910 has become more 

268 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

openly anti-foreign. That of Madero was long 
ago described by an able Mexican^ as a "Boxer" 
uprising against the foreigners. This relatively mild 
upheaval has grown, under Carranza and Obregon 
(directed by their foreign radical advisers), into an 
openly hostile government system in which the 
properties and persons of foreigners are set at the 
mercy of the executives of Mexico. The hectic 
efforts to force a "nationalization of the country's 
resources," directed almost solely against foreign 
corporations and individuals; the prohibitions 
against foreigners owning land, either openly in 
vast zones along the coasts and international bor- 
ders (where most of the previous foreign develop- 
ment has taken place) or as members of companies, 
even, throughout the country; the constitutional 
provisions that any foreigner may be expelled from 
the country at the caprice of the president — all 
these give proof enough that the chief changes in 
the Constitution of 1917 are anti-foreign in import 
and in terms. 

That this is largely the result of the psychology 
of fear is illustrated with pecuhar force by a con- 
versation between an American and a Mexican 
friend. The question of American "unfairness" 
toward Mexico's national aims was being discussed, 
when the American asked: 

"What would you do if Guatemala were making 
such demands upon your country?" 

"Ah, Guatemala," rephed the Mexican. "We 

1 Francisco Bulnes, "The Wtole Truth about Mexico," New 
York, 1916, pages 103 et seq. 

269 I 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

would just turn about and mash little Guatemala 
into the ground." 

But for the United States he had only impotent 
rage and the retaliation of studied annoyances. 

The Mexican attitude is patently that of the 
conscious weakling. He resents, more than any- 
thing else, the manifestations of what he deems a 
sense of superiority in the American and in other 
foreigners. This is the attitude of the Mexican in 
the group to-day, but it has not always been so. 
Under Diaz the feeling toward foreigners (even 
while the fear of intervention was nurtured) was 
that they should be encouraged to bring their en- 
terprise and their capital into Mexico for the pur- 
pose of building that firm basis of material pros- 
perity to which Diaz looked so steadily. 

In that time, the foreigner was welcomed, and if 
he received more generous opportunity than else- 
where, it was considered vital to offer him such 
opportunity in order to bring him to Mexico. It 
was recognized in that day that such native capital 
as existed '^results from exorbitant profits and not 
from the importance of capital."^ The profits of 
any investment in the country were bound to be 
large. The idea of Diaz was to harness this eco- 
nomic condition to the importation of the capital 
Mexico needed so much. His policy doubtless 
looked forward to a day when the increase of money 
available for investment should bring about the 
amelioration of the entire economic fault. And 
actually, when he was driven out of office millions 

1 Report of the Mexican Minister of Fomento, 1885, page ix. 
270 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

of foreign money were being invested in public 
service enterprises returning minor interest, and the 
bonds of the Mexican nation had been changed 
from questionable securities "worth" some twenty 
per cent, annually on the quotations to solid invest- 
ments netting the purchaser less than five per cent. 
All this had raised the Mexican high in the estima- 
tion of the outside world, so that there was relatively 
little of the patronage from foreigners which he so 
much resented. 

This spirit of patronage has returned, and with 
it a national feeling of spite and bitter hatred toward 
foreigners which is one of the important facts of 
the present era. It has already resulted in poisoning 
the individual mind of the Mexicans toward the 
individual foreigners whom they once liked — even 
if they also feared and resented, a little, their suc- 
cess and abihties. In the industrial belt, and par- 
ticularly in the oil fields, the increasing numbers of 
new-come foreigners has reduced the once ample 
leaven of understanding foreign individuals who 
first carved their way into the Mexican jungle and 
into friendship with the Mexicans. But even there, 
when there is understanding, and above all where 
there is dignity in the attitude of the foreigner, the 
Mexican still responds with respect and with friend- 
ship. Outside the circles where socialistic and 
radical propaganda are active, most of the natives 
are still friendly toward individual foreigners. 

The attitude of other days and the potential atti- 
tude of to-day is that the foreigners bring to the 

individual Mexican the opportunity to gain a better 

271 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

livelihood, and a development of the country which 
means his greater personal comfort. Toward the 
end of the time of Diaz, the number of Mexican 
laborers who went across the American border for 
periods of work in mines, on farms and on the rail- 
ways was growing, and the news of the good pay 
and comfortable hving was filtering back throughout 
Mexico. No American employer of those days was 
surprised, when he talked with his peons, to find him- 
self expected to answer many questions of this sort: 

''When is it, Senor, that you Americans are com- 
ing down to take Mexico and pay us all three pesos 
a day for work like this, which we now must do for 
fifty centavos?" 

To-day, and without American intervention, 
thousands of these peons are receiving such pay for 
the work they do for foreign companies, and in the 
oil fields, at least, a fair imitation of the ''American 
standard of living" has become general. It is doubt- 
ful indeed if those who plan an expulsion of foreign 
companies through the nationalization of properties 
would find an enthusiastic welcome even at the 
hands of the thoroughly unionized workers for for- 
eign companies. These workers, under the inspira- 
tion of radical agitators, make it a habit to demand 
many things which, if they were sure their demands 
would be acted upon literally, would never be 
heard of. 

In the higher realms of Mexican life, where busi- 
ness questions are more closely followed than by 
laborers or radical agitators or government bureau- 
crats, there is still another important attitude. The 

272 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

utter dependence of Mexico upon the outside world 
for her whole economic life (not to mention the 
vast export taxes on oil and minerals which support 
the govermnent), is recognized by these men just 
as it is recognized by the foreign tradesmen who 
deal with them. The result is that this great sub- 
stantial element in Mexico is opposed, definitely, to 
the anti-foreign movement in government, and 
suffers consciously from the foreign distrust of 
Mexico which shortens their credit and increases 
their business problems as a result. 

To placate this element the Obregon government 
inaugurated the system of offering foreign trade, 
not the rights which it should seek through more 
conventional laws than those fathered by the Con- 
stitution of 1917, but privileges under those laws. 
The whole system of encouraging foreign investment 
and foreign trade at that time was based on the 
stated willingness of the Mexican governing group 
to wink at its own laws and to give foreigners the 
privilege of violating their letter and spirit. This 
was a breaking away from the hard and fast control 
of business which the radical laws provided, but 
it had not yet reached the era of true welcome to 
foreign enterprise, — as those who accepted the privi- 
leges learned to their discomfort. The government 
still controlled the privilege and exacted a continu- 
ing tribute of support.^ 

1 C/. Wallace Thompson, "Trading With Mexico," Dodd, Mead & 
Co., New York, 1921. The idea of privilege vs. rights is there de- 
veloped further than can be done here. The book discusses the 
revolutionary and business conditions in Mexico phase by phase, 
especially in the light of this principle of privilege vs. rights. 

273 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Underneath all these subterfuges, however, ex- 
ists a very genume wilhngness to accept the for- 
eigner at his own valuation, to work for him or 
with him in full and genial accord. Even in the 
most heated period of Mexican-American antag- 
onism, during the war of 1847-1849, the mass of 
the people found the invading Americans thoroughly- 
honest and decent folk. One of the amusing stories 
told in Monterey is of the scurrying of the native 
population to the hiUs when the Americans took 
possession of the town, — and their return three days 
later in droves, to sell the soldiers their chickens, 
eggs and the native delicacies which they had 
cooked for the promising traffic. 

At the time of the landing of American troops in 
Vera Cruz in 1914, the Americans in Mexico City 
were treated with extreme courtesy by President 
Heurta. Many were approached by their Mexican 
friends, who offered them asylum in their own 
homes, with the understanding that when the 
American army reached the capital, the Americans 
should return the protection in kind! In fact, in 
the course of investigations made by American 
agents throughout Mexico during the Great War, 
the reports were almost unanimous in their indica- 
tion that the Mexicans would be far from hostile, 
as individuals, to American control of their country 
pending the pacification which even then seemed 
hopeless at the hands of the Mexican rulers of that 
day. 

The Mexican attitude toward foreigners has, 
indeed, most important psychological significance, 

274 



MEXICO AND THE WORLD WITHOUT 

but it can be summed up in two phrases: The 
Mexicans as a group fear and expect foreign inter- 
vention and liate foreigners for the superiority 
which that possibiUty indicates; as individuals the 
Mexicans hke and appreciate the quahties of 
foreigners, and actually welcome them and their 
development of the country. 

Upon the latter attitude much solid progress can 
be built. Under the rule of radical socialists and 
syndicalists there has been a most unpromising 
strengthening of the group-fear, and the national- 
ization of the property of foreigners has all but come 
into actuality. That attitude, however, seems 
definitely to be without a sohd foundation in 
individual Mexican psychology, and so, we must 
beheve, is destined to pass away completely. 
The great friendly spirit of the Mexican people as 
a whole, their wilUngness to be led and to be 
educated by foreigners, remains. When it is used 
with due respect for the deep desires and traditions 
of the Mexican heart, this feeling can indeed be 
counted upon to aid in the working out of the 
regeneration of that unhappy land. 



275 



CHAPTER XII 

THINGS DREAMED OF 

THE whole sweep from horizon to horizon of the 
Mexican sky is to-day overcast with clouds, 
and those clouds have seemed to occupy most of 
the pages of this study. Let us seek, now, to reach 
our way through them, to brush them aside so far 
as we may, to look on the purer blue, if blue it be, 
that is behind them. 

The national ideals, the things statesmen strive 
for and soldiers die for, and mothers nurture in the 
minds of their children! These are indeed the 
heights of aspiration, in whatever age we hve, what- 
ever language we speak, to whatever philosophy 
we may pin our faith. Patriotism is, to the average 
man the world around, the first and often the 
greatest of the disinterested passions, at once the 
fact and the fountainhead of national idealism. 

Whether we march to the tunes of ancient 
anthems of glorious death for king and country, or 
to the reckless rhythms of modern socialism, patriot- 
ism is the name by which we call our passion and 
the hope which we summon to quiet our fears. 

Thus Mexican patriotism is and must be the 
great, the unalloyed criterion of the nation's 

276 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

idealism. And so we find it, for the patriotism of 
Mexico is a patriotism of the soil, a love for the 
land itself which is expressed in a devotion which 
is truly and simply beautiful. It was this sort of 
patriotism which made great the hfe of Elizabethan 
England, and which colors the life of England to 
this day. The love of the Englishman for his 
picturesque villages, for the rolling landscape of the 
south, for the mountains of the northland, for the 
white chffs of Devon or the sloping shores of Wales, 
— to this deep, inbred patriotism is comparable the 
love of the Mexican for his "tierra.'' This is the 
individual patriotism of the Mexican, an individual 
love for the particular plot of ground where he was 
born or grew or loved. In the last analysis this 
catHke attachment to the soil is the basic and per- 
manent form of the patriotism of Mexico. The 
Mexican soldier lays down his life simply and gladly, 
indeed, for the defense of his home village, even 
if he is not so sentimental about the defense of his 
whole country. And no more beautiful picture will 
ever be painted than the sight of a peon woman, 
shrouded in her black shawl, trudging weary, dusty 
miles under the glaring sun, sometimes for days on 
end, so that she may give birth to her child in a 
deserted hut which still marks her "tierra", the 
identical place of her birth and her growing years. 

Limited such a patriotism is, sentimental indeed, 
but because it is firm, because it is the one subject 
in all the range of thought, almost, that a Mexican 
will not ridicule, the love of the "tierra^' seems a 

worthy beginning for the building of a yet broader 

277 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

patriotism of the "patria'\ or fatherland. For the 
idea of the "tierra" is distinctly narrow and narrow- 
ing as well, perhaps. One Mexican student of his 
own people has written his great indignation over 
the fact that products from Central Mexico are 
regarded as "foreign", along with English and 
American manufactures, by the natives of the dis- 
tant State of Yucatan. These ''minute father- 
lands" are regarded with scorn and apprehension by 
many of the observers of Mexico, Mexicans as well 
as foreigners. But because in all the shifting sands 
of Mexican psychology, above all in the treacherous 
morass of Mexican poUtics and government, these 
tiny plots of solid earth, sowed deep with the senti- 
ment and faith of the people, should rather be 
accepted with joy and enthusiasm than feared as 
an element of disintegration. 

Far more dangerous, and worthy of much more 
apprehension, is the lack of interest in and love for 
the traditions, for the history, for the true achieve- 
ment of the Mexican people. Mexican patriotism 
can hardly be expected to be a patriotism of ideas 
and ideals, because of the relatively low plane of the 
mass of the people. It can, indeed, hardly be ex- 
pected to be a patriotism of leaders, for the flair 
for the leader of to-day is sure to die down to- 
morrow and be gone the day that follows. It could 
not safely be a patriotism of race, for that would be 
disintegrating indeed. But it could well be and 
indeed some day must be a love and reverence for 
the institutions of her history and of her highest 
ambitions in government, art and taste. And this 

278 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

it is not yet, and cannot be imagined to be, by the 
broadest stretch of faith. 

The loyalty to one's origins, the respect for one's 
national traditions, the nurturing of the moniunents 
of stone and on canvas and paper, of the great men 
of one's country, the wholesome, unquestioning 
support of the great movements and great institu- 
tions of one's government, — these are the ultimate 
of patriotism. And to this Mexico must yet attain, 
as the patriotism of Elizabethan England which 
was manifested in the love for tiny bits of England 
has grown to be a love of all England, a love of the 
institutions of Britain, a love, indeed, of the idea 
and the institution that have made the Dominions 
as true a bit of England as her hills themselves. 
Could Drake's sailors have dreamed of such an 
England, of such a patriotism? No more can the 
Mexican peon mother, trudging her way along the 
road to her "tierra^' with hardly the ghost of a 
thought to explain her instinct to herself — no more 
can she — or we — see in her instinct the beginnings 
of a patriotism that will perhaps some day be great 
and true. 

To-day Mexico is busy tearing to shreds the last 
patches of the civilization which the Spaniard built 
for her and Diaz crystallized to modern living for 
her. To-day her revolutionaries are casting away 
the last vestiges of her national strength, — her 
national entity. She has lost her arts and her song, 
and still the holocaust goes on. Perhaps the van- 
dals will destroy everything that is beautiful and 
aspiring, to the very foundations of her towering 

279 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

churches. But this will remain, this first and last 
thing, the love of the earth that bore them. And 
upon that and perhaps upon that alone will be 
built at last a Mexico that is worthy of the wonder- 
ful land which has borne her sons and which they 
love, and worthy of the mighty heritages which 
have come down through all the winding streams of 
past history to the morass that is to-day. 

It is perhaps because of this kinship for the soil, 
this spirit of long loving of the tiny tierras, that the 
so-called land question or ''agrarian problem" has 
assumed such astonishing proportions in the Mexi- 
can national psychology. It seems as if indeed the 
outburst of savage greed which revolutionary doc- 
trines have so complicated as to make the providing 
of private farms for all the peons of Mexico the 
most outstanding of all the national ''ideals" would 
never be quieted until it is resolved on the basis of 
its psychological pathology. Twelve years of bloody 
revolutionary orgy have had their mainspring in 
the assertion of the leaders that the land must be 
returned to the Indians who originally owned it. 
The battles of those twelve years have been fought 
by peon and Indian soldiers whose guerdon has 
been a promise of land (and considerable loot). 
Alberto J. Pani, a faithful follower of Carranza 
until his decline and then a follower of Obregon, 
decided that the patriotism of Mexico had two 
deep roots, the most important being the "owner- 
ship direct or indirect of the land." The second 
root, race, tradition, customs, language and perhaps 
rehgion could not, he felt, replace the former, and 

280 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

''until this craving for land is appeased it would be 
immoral to educate the Indian so as to bring home 
to him with greater force his hopeless condition. 
A community which does not suffer from poverty 
seeks culture spontaneously."^ 

Certainly this revolutionary doctrine is psycho- 
logical, for it is pure theory, but a theory upon 
which has been initiated and developed one of the 
most destructive revolutions of history. Proof 
enough there is, and from Mexican minds as well 
as from printed philosophies, that older and wiser 
students (even among the progressive factions) are 
not so sure that the holding of unearned property 
is the first step in progress from the savage plane 
toward civilization. 

The history of Mexico itself contains an aston- 
ishing proof of the ineffective results which may 
come from too hberal a hand with the ignorant 
members of the group. For, strange as it may seem 
to the average foreign student, the loss of the com- 
munal lands of the Mexican Indians — the "wrong" 
for whose righting so much blood has been spilled 
in the past decade — came from the very thing which 
the revolution of Carranza so enthusiastically advo- 
cated; that is, from land distribution. Under 
Juarez, the Indian president of Mexico, the Laws 
of Reform were enacted, giving the Indian, along 
with other things, the right to dispose of the com- 
munal lands, with the result that he promptly did 

1 Cf. Alberto J. Pani, "Hygiene in Mexico, a Study of Sanitary 
and Educational Problems." Translation of Ernest L. Gorgoza, 
New York, 1917. 

281 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

dispose of them. They were sold, in large pieces 
and in small, and the money spent. The Indians, 
fully ninety-five per cent, of whom were illiterates, 
were given the property of which Mr. Pani speaks, 
and because their minds were incapable of handhng 
the responsibility, the property was easily taken 
from them by those who, in every land, can and 
do take advantage of weakness and ignorance. 
There is no desire or need to excuse those who 
took the land; the fact was a fact of policy, a poUcy 
of generous desire to help the Indians and give 
them what they wanted. But hke many policies of 
generosity, it worked without the slightest recogni- 
tion of Indian ignorance and greed, and because 
the control had passed beyond their hands, the 
ofl&cers of government could do nothing. 

And now the plan is to take, by nationalization, 
vast tracts of cultivated land, to ''give back" to 
the Indians the communes which under the Laws 
of Reform they were allowed to sell, and actually 
did sell, — to give them, again, tracts of land in 
their own right to cultivate as they were given 
their communal lands half a century ago. It is, 
indeed, simply the reductio ad ahsurdum of the 
socialistic ideal, the carrying out, in actual life, of 
the humorous story of the sociahst who, when 
asked what would happen after the distribution of 
all property equally had worked around, as it in- 
evitably would, to a new concentration in the hands 
of the powerful, answered, ''Oh, then we would 
have another distribution." 

Reduced to its psychological principle, this is 

282 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

what the Mexican is doing to-day. And because 
sociahsm is fashionable at the moment, he is find- 
ing powerful support among the radical circles of 
the entire world. But that support does not, un- 
fortunately for him, alter the immutable facts of 
human nature. 

The imagination of the outsider is juggled into 
an unappraising endorsement of these pitiful, child- 
ish plans for the amehoration of the unhappy con- 
dition of the peons. Before him is set the picture 
of peonage, with its attendant evils, the misery and 
poverty and debihty that are its accompaniments. 
But he misses one illuminating fact which Mexicans 
usually do not discuss and foreigners seldom realize. 
This is that the actual origin of most of the so- 
called slavery is this same ghastly falsehood of re- 
lationship, this disparity between the facts of the 
law and the operation of the law. Such slavery, 
such forced labor as exists, is a result of the psycho- 
logical and legal irresponsibility of the peon, which 
invites and seems to demand that those who deal 
with him take matters into their own hands. Under 
the customs of peon life, the worker borrows 
money — ^his advances run, sometimes, into the hun- 
dred of pesos. To recover these advances the em- 
ployer finds he has no legal recourse and so takes 
extra-legal methods, and forces the peon to work out 
the debt, with the purchased connivance of the local 
authorities. 

It was Hterally possible in the time of Diaz, and 
it is probably easier to-day, for an Indian, as a 
messenger, to carry off and sell a typewriter worth 

283 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

two hundred and fifty pesos, and the defrauded 
tradesman and the Indian's employer would have 
no civil recourse whatever. But the same peon, 
if employed on an hacienda, could be held in '' slav- 
ery" for four years to work out a debt of a third 
the value of the typewriter. Thus the legal situation 
in Mexico, the lack of harmony between the facts 
of Mexican psychology and education and the 
nature of the laws with which the land is governed 
is a continual invitation, to the peon on the one 
hand to employ all his small wits in schemes to 
defraud his employers, and for the employers on 
the other hand to devise all means, legal and other- 
wise, to keep his peons in debt and at work. 

These facts the Mexicans know well, and yet 
these same ignorant, unfortunate Indians and peons, 
who can neither read nor write, ostensibly have the 
power to vote and are ostensibly the beneficiaries of 
all sorts of modern schemes of socialization. Yet 
in all the history of Mexico, with all her endless 
revolutions and all her great upheavals, there has 
never been an honest effort (by a revolutionary 
body) to change the fundamental, ill-adapted laws 
which are at the root of the national difficulties. 
Even Diaz, with all his wisdom, did not work ef- 
fectively to prepare, by education, for a democracy 
which would replace the condition which made his 
untimately destructive methods necessary. 

We must admire Diaz broadly for the fact that he 
met the conditions which he found, faced them and 
used them for the building of his peace and progress, 
but we cannot forget that when he had done that 

284 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

he did not go on to the creation of that new genera- 
tion, — the generation that should to-day be in the 
saddle of Mexican government in place of the puny 
Maderos, the pompous Carranzas and the dema- 
gogic Obregons. Diaz, for all his sincere interest 
and almost pitiful hopes for education, was not an 
educator, and he gathered few true educators 
about him. The fault may have been with his 
time and with the methods which men followed in 
that time; but the fault itself remains. 

In his thirty years of rule Diaz saw nearly fifteen 
million Mexican children grow from infancy to 
their early maturity; virtually the entire population 
of the country was renewed completely under his 
rule. He saw them born, he saw them die like flies 
in early infancy; he saw the winnowed wheat of the 
bitter physical survival grow into eager childhood; 
he saw incipient geniuses arise, in music and in 
leadership of their tiny fellows; he saw some two 
milUon of these go to his schools; he saw them 
taught in the loudly shouted chorus of the Mexican 
classroom; he saw their childhood pass into early 
adulthood, and the precious moment of awakening 
pass and disappear; he saw the girls blossom to 
women and the boys grow to youth, with the whole 
force of their vital, mental and psychic energy 
turned to sensuality; he saw the women fade to 
ugly hags, the youths to dull and stupid manhood, 
their only vitality the plunging of themselves, and 
in the end their country, into debilitating excesses. 

Diaz can be forgiven by those of us who watch 
to-day, but the times cannot be forgiven, and the 

285 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

long dull ignorance which has let this ghastly- 
wasting of childhood go on for all the centuries and, 
worst of all, continue into this day of light and 
progress, — that ignorance cannot be forgiven. Only 
in this was the terrible mistake made, that the 
moment when the instincts of the searching man 
reached the transition stage of ripening was never 
caught and used. The Mexican child, struggling 
unaided to the highest summit of his personal and 
group consciousness, the awakening to the mys- 
teries of sex, the age of romance and eagerness, of 
keenest curiosity and most vivid imagination, has 
been guided, not by wise teachers or parents, but 
by the brute, unsocial group instincts which have 
came up through hun and his fellows in the 
long heritage from the animal world. These in- 
stincts and these alone have been clamped upon 
the back of each and every Mexican child and have 
crystalized into the traditions which make his life. 

This ''law of transiency", the fact that the flitting 
immanence of the awakening comes to every child 
at some certain moment and passes forever if it is 
not caught and used to its utmost, takes heavy toll 
from its neglect in Mexico. That neglect has made 
the dull, sodden history of the past and the terrible 
chaos of the present. 

So we find our way back again to the vital sub- 
ject of education, the beacon of human progress, 
the very essence of all the hope and of all the 
failure of Mexico. We wander far afield, indeed, 
and many times we lose our way, but always, 
around the rocks, just beyond this shallow or that 

286 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

ugly promontory, we glimpse that beacon. It 
stands in Mexico to-day, its light dimmer than at 
any time in all her modern history; but its founda- 
tions go deep into the souls of those twelve million 
unlettered and untrained natives, — the "eighty 
five per cent." of the population. 

All through Mexican history, the leaders of the 
country have sought for other channels than that 
pointed by this ancient lighthouse. Always the 
national energy has been directed to the search 
for the easier way, the more spectacular way, the 
prouder way. And through each succeeding ex- 
periment the light has burned dimmer, the precious 
moment of transciency has gathered new and uglier 
heritages. Education has dimmed and faded. 

Even Madero, who truly believed in education, 
wrote, before he attained to the presidency, ''We 
do not believe that the ignorant masses of the 
population are a hindrance to democracy."^ Madero 
blamed the evils of Mexico on militarism and the 
innumerable reelections of President Diaz. Yet 
the son of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada (the friend of 
Juarez and one of the earlier presidents of Mexico) 
wrote in 1916, long after Madero was laid in his 
grave: 

The bitter conclusion is that the greatest single obstacle 
which has prevented Mexican realization of her desires for 
democracy is the lack of civilization and culture — the problem 
of national education.^ 

1 Francisco I. Madero, "La Sucesion Presidencial en 1910," 
page 135. 

^Trejo Lerdo de Tejada, "La Revolucion y el Nacionalismo," 
Havana, 1916, page 116. 

287 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

The questions of the methods and means of 
Mexican education need not enter here, but there 
is a yet greater phase which does he definitely 
within the province of this book. It reaches into 
the heart of the Mexican psychology, and it gives a 
ray of hope to all who believe, despite appearances, 
that there is salvation for the Mexicans from within 
themselves. That phase is the ''sociaUzation" of 
the Mexicans.^ 

In a previous chapter ^ there was brief discussion 
of the long climb of humanity up the ladder of 
development from beast self-assertion and the fear 
regime through the higher planes of group con- 
sciousness, economic consciousness and social con- 
sciousness. There it was shown that in actuaUty 
the Mexican as a class has so far emerged to little 
beyond the very beginnings of the plane where the 
compelling hungers are for wealth and power and 
place. He has not yet developed even the hunger 
for knowledge, and the plane of true ideals and 
feeUng, the plane of socialized will and the plane 
of God-consciousness, have hardly been dreamed 
of by any but an infinitesimal minority. 

In the question of education we face, primarily, 
the problem of awakening in the Mexican mind, 
first of all the hunger for knowledge, and then the 
hungers which transcend knowledge in the scale. 
It is the attainment of these four higher planes 

^ The author is again indebted to his old master, Daniel Moses 
Fisk, for the fundamental principles of this dynamic idea of 
socialization. They are set forth in his printed notes on "Socializa- 
tion", Topeka, 1920. 

^ Chapter rx, The Mexican Crowd, pages 207 et seq. 
288 



THINGS DREAMED OP 

which constitute the "sociahzation" of the in- 
dividual in the group. 

To most of us, education means merely the 
awakening of the hunger for knowledge and the 
satisfying of that hunger to a greater or a lesser 
degree. From the point of this recognition, we 
pass usually without more formality into the dis- 
cussion of systems of education and the need of 
funds. 

But the education which must come to Mexico 
must be planned on a far broader scale. It must 
include not only letters and figures, the stocking of 
the peon mind with the ability to read his ballot 
and add his accounts with the company store. 
The problem has been lifted far beyond that plane 
by the vital necessities of the world about him 
and by the very prostitution of the shibboleths of 
all the great social hungers in the mouths of 
demagogues and charlatans. The pressure upon 
Mexico from without is mightier than the pressure 
upon any other of the backward peoples of the 
whole world. The problems of Mexico, of the 
government, of the business organization, of the 
people and of their psychology must be settled, 
and settled forthwith and together. The world 
will not wait, and the progress of humanity will 
not wait. 

But here light dawns. From the plane of knowl- 
edge-hunger upward the social forces blossom to- 
gether and together march upon their way. When, 
in the dim recesses of the animal mind, we awak- 
ened, ages ago, to the consciousness of our group 

289 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

life, we laid the beginnings of socialization. Grouj^ 
life such as exists in Mexico is largely unsocial; 
it is a form of selfishness, of individualism. The 
primary need of the Mexican social structure is for 
the realization of the interpendence of the individual 
units of the nation. This is vital and imperative, 
and the road to such a reaUzation must be found. 
Materiahsm in Mexico has failed, as it had to fail, 
because the world men hve in is a world of men 
and not a world of things. A world of pure knowl- 
edge is a force in the Mexican, yet with all his 
intellect (on whatever social and mental plane he 
may live) he argues in sophistries and drives the 
whole of his great or little psychic force to the 
stimulation and the gratification of his animal 
emotions. 

But science and religion hold out a promise of a 
leap to the true social plane, a leap from the firm 
ground of that almost savage group hfe, of that 
utterly animal sex life, into the realm of social 
consciousness. That sex life is the strongest ele- 
ment in the Mexican psychology, and its mightiest 
ally for social advancement is in the fact that is 
patent to all who see, — that the Mexican child 
before the age of puberty is quicker, more active, 
keener, perhaps, than the average child of other 
dark races. His combined ancestry serves him well 
until, in the moment of change from childhood to 
adulthood, the whole force of his life is switched 
away from mere Hving and growing into the plane 
where sex rules supreme in the mind as well as in 
the body. 

290 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

Now this change to adolescence is the moment, as 
well, when the child of kindlier heritage and calmer 
traditions awakens to his social place and achieves, 
if he achieves it at all, that change of heart from 
himseK to a higher plane which the Churches call 
conversion. Heretofore the educational system 
of Mexico, and indeed the Church system, has 
neglected that great moment. The crisis of educa- 
tion from the psychological viewpoint is the de- 
termining and the taking advantage of the critical 
moment in the mind when the child is most teach- 
able. It seems that, because this moment comes 
years before it comes to other races, it has never 
been truly determined in the Mexican child. 
Because it has not, both boys and girls reach the 
very peak of their teachability and are well on the 
slip downward to the animal plane to which they 
were born before their teachers have begun the 
process of sublimating those awakening forces to 
the making of the new mind which education seeks. 

The problem is tremendous in any case, but if, 
in the course of the years to come, the Mexican 
government or some foreign organization equipped 
for the great work will consent to devote itself to 
the study, not of educational systems, but of the 
Mexican child, it seems as if it might be that the 
primary problem of the education of Mexico might 
be solved. The precious moments are being lost, 
year after year and in child after child, so that 
even the pitifully few thousands who are edu- 
cated in Mexico get their education too soon or too 
late. The lift over the almost bottomless pit of 

291 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

age-old degeneracy of mind and emotion is all but 
beyond hope, but this one study may mean the 
removal of the one handicap that will make the 
leap possible. 

Perhaps in this we ask for the millennium, and for 
a system of education beyond that which prevails 
even in our own lands. But there are such forces, 
such organizations as are here suggested, capable of 
making the great survey of the Mexican child mind, 
of the Mexican physical cycle, which are the bases 
of such a regenerate educational system. Such an 
ideal is not Utopian, but extremely practical; it 
could be carried through with a competent staff in 
two years, and the new system of education evolved 
at least to a testing-out basis within another year. 
The difficulty is not with the means but with the 
material itself, the Mexican mind with all its un- 
expected facets, all its unplumbed depths. 

The effort in these pages has been to show — what 
seems increasingly evident — that we cannot classify 
the Mexican mind by any criteria which we yet 
know. And yet we foreigners have been con- 
tinually trying so to classify it, and the Mexicans 
themselves are forever classifying everything. The 
call seems to be for a study of the individual, in his 
solitude and in his group reactions — for always he 
is an individual and not a socialized unit — and from 
that the creation of a basic standard, new to us as 
to the Mexicans, from which to start. Thus and 
thus only will we find the way to turn his blind 
search for personal satisfactions, animal, economic 
and politicaljinto a noble quest for the welfare of the 

292 



THINGS DREAMED OF 

social whole toward which Mexico is struggling 
with such pitiful results. 

And when the way is found — that way which 
seems so far distant to their minds and to ours 
to-day — ^when that way is found, there is waiting 
for the harness that one deep, true, and beautiful 
emotion, the love of the land they live in, to be 
turned into a force of regeneration and of creation 
for the benefit not of Mexico and the Mexicans 
alone, but of the world as well. 



293 



INDEX 



Abstract thinking, 142. 
Acquisitiveness, 163. 

See also Honesty. 
Adolescence, 290, 291. 
Adornment, love of, 190. 
Alfonso Quijano the Good, 251. 
Alhambra, 108. 
All Saints Day, 84. 
Altruism, 40. 

American. See United States. 
Americanization, 15. 
Americans, as employers, 194, 

272. 
Amusements. 

See Chap. IV, 75. 
Anger, 152, 157, 158, 181. 
"Anglada, The Art of the 

Spaniard," quoted, 108. 
Anglo-Saxon, 1, 24, 37, 47, 144, 

162, 169, 175, 180, 184, 251. 
attitude toward Mexicans, 

42. 
An im al plane, 207, 208, 211. 
Animals, cruelty to, 159, 160. 
Anti-foreignism. See Foreigners. 
Apathy, 41, 162, 178, 180, 248. 
Appearance, valuation of, 192. 
Appreciation, love of, 197. 
Architecture, 105, 107, 109, 132. 
Aristocracy, 225, 230. 

See also Patriarchy. 
Aristotle, quoted, 174. 
Army, psychology of, 189. 



Art, Aztec, 105. 

Mexican 126 et seq. 

Renaissance standards, 107, 

108. 

Spanish conception, 107. 

Artists, 127. 
Athletics, 96 et seq. 
Attention, direction of, 178, 185. 
Aztecs, civihzation of, 105. 

festivals of, 78. 

traders, 53. 

B 

Babies, 180. 

Band Concerts, 68, 92. , 

Bancroft, H. H., quoted, 78. 

Banditry, psychology of, 187. 

Barber, E. A., quoted. 111. 

Bargaining, 55. 

Baseball, 97. 

Baskets, 115. 

Baxter, Sylvester, quoted, 110. 

Bear, playing the, 69. 

Beauty, instinct for, 168. 

Bells, pottery, 114. 

Birthdays, 89. 

Blankets, weaving of, 118. 

Bolshevism, 215. 

See also Radicalism. 
Books, use of, 131. 
Booths, See Puestos. 
BowUng, 97. 

"Boxer" rebeUion, 227, 269. 
Brownies, 125. 
Buckle, Henry T., quoted, 29, 48. 



^95 



THE MEXICAN MIND 



Bullbaiting, 90. 
Bullfights, 89, 160. 

amateur, 99. 

Bulnes, Francisco, quoted, 269. 
Business, customs of, 52 et seq. 

C 

Caciques, 23, 247. 
Cafes, 96. 



Clubs, 96. 

Cockfighting, 90, 160. 

Codes of law, 13, 47. 

Codex, 105. 

Columbus, Christopher, 6, 9. 

Columbus, New Mexico, 261. 

Communism, Indian, 9, 11, 40, 

217, 222, 228, 281. 
Compadres, 61 et seq., 71, 214. 



Calderon de la Barca, Mme., Compte, Emmanuel, 133. 



quoted, 124. 
Carbajal, Francisco, 171. 
Cargadores, 51. 
Carnival Tuesday, 81. 



Concrete thinking, 138, 142, 143, 

147. 
Confederate States of America, 

259. 



Carranza, Venustiano, 11, 98, Conservatism, psychology of, 33, 



144, 162, 194, 220, 221, 244, 

247, 256, 258, 266, 267, 281. 
Carranza Doctrine, 266. 
Casinos, 96. 

Castes. See Class Relationships. 
Cathedral, decorations of, 79. 
Catholic Church. See Church, 

Roman Catholic. 
Catholic Party, 245 et seq., 248. 
Checks, bank, use of, 58. 
Christmas, celebration of, 86. 
Chromos, 59. 

Church buildings, 108 et seq. 
Church, moral control, 165. 

Protestantism, 39. 

Roman Catholic, 26, 39, 

49, 79, 165, 172, 224, 239, 

247, 249. 

effect on legends, 49. 

— — holidays, 79 et seq. 

in pohtics, 249. 

"Religious" wars, 39. 

Circumstance, psychological ac- Cruelty, 158 et seq 

ceptance of, 134. Cuernavaca, pottery of, 112. 

Class pride, 191. Culture, Latin, 2. 

Class relationships, 30, 224 et seq. of Mexico, 22. 

Clerks, 57. See also Indian C, Mestizo 

Climate, influence of, 29 et seq. C, Spanish C. 

296 



46. 

Conservative Party, 236, 241. 
Constitution of 1867, 241. 
Constitution of 1917, 33, 221, 

242, 269. 
Corpus Christi, celebration of, 

83. 
Cortez, Hernando, 53, 76. 
Costumbre, 49, 51. 
Cotton weaving, 117. 
Courtesy. See Pohteness, 
Courts, justice in, 252. 
Courtship, 70. 
Creoles, definition of, 3. 

in revolution, 3. 

psychology of, 27, 30, 225. 

See also Patriarchy. 
Cricket, 97. 

Crime, psychology of, 211. 
"Crowd, The Mexican," Chap. 

IX, 205. 
Crowds, 166. 



INDEX 



"Culture, Mexican," Chap. V, 

101. 
Cunning, 35. 
Curiosity, 162. 
Custom, bondage of, 49, 50. 
"Custom, Signposts of," Chap. 

Ill, 46. 

D 

Dancing, 85, 93, 124. 

De la Barra, Francisco, 245. 



"'Emotional' Mexican, The," 

Chap. VII, 150. 
Emotions. See Chap. VII, 150. 

description of, 151. 

intellect and, 133. 

Empirical thinking, 141. 
Employers, methods of, 178, 213. 
England, 2, 277. 
EngUsh, patriotism of, 277, 279. 

psychology of, 192, 252. 

Environment, 28 et seq. 
De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inez, 126. Esquivel Obregon, Toribio, 



Deceit. See Lying. 
Decision, 134, 176. 

• abnormal types of, 183, 

normal types of, 182. 

Demagogy, 14, 42, 243, 247. 
Desires, psychological, 186. 
Details, selection of, 140. 
Determination, 177. 

See also Stubbornness. 
Dia del campo, 99. 
Diaz, Bernal, quoted, 76. 
Diaz, Felix, 218. 
Diaz, Porfirio, 3, 79, 80, 127, 129, FataHsm, 163, 179. 

135, 136, 137, 138, 145, 146, Fear, 152, 158 et seq. 

167, 172, 208, 236, 237, 238, Feather Work, 121. 

244, 252, 256, 260, 263, 284, Federal system, 240, 247. 

285, 287. Fencing, 98. 
Dignity, 191. Ferdinand VII, 240. 
Diplomacy, 144, 162, 262, 268. Festivals, list of, 79. 
Dolores, Grito de. See Sixteenth Aztec, 78 

of September. 



quoted, 37, 235, 236, 244, 

251, 253. 
Ethics. See Church, morals. 
Evarts, William M., note to 

Diaz, 145, 261. 



Fairies, 125. 
Fairs, Market, 54, 77. 
Family, organization, 232. 
Family, Love of, 156. 
Famine, 30, 200. 



Domesticity, 188. 
Dowries, 70. 
Drake, Sir Francis, 279. 
Drawn Work, 119. 

E 
Easter, celebration of, 81. 



psychology of, 88. 

See Chap. VII, 75. 
FeudaUsm, 9. 

See also Patriarchy. 
Fibres, weaving of, 116. 
FideUty to master, 34. 
Fisk, Daniel Moses, quotpd, 207, 

288. 



Education, 15, 32, 131, 175, 180, Flattery, 198. 

284 et seq., 288. Flowers, Battle of, 81. 

Embroidery, 120. Folk-dancing, 124. 

297 



THE MEXICAN MIND 

Folklore, 125. Guatemala, 269. 

Foreigners. See Chap. XI, 257. Guerrero, Julio, quoted, 201. 

anti-foreignism, 227, 269. Guzman, Martin Luis, quoted, 

attitude toward Mexicans, 147. 

136, 194. 

encouragement of, 270, 273. H 

faith in, 35. Habit, 173. 

letters of introduction, 66. Halfbreeds. See Mestizos. 

methods of, 32. Halfbreedism, 18, 44. 

Mexican attitude toward. Hammocks, 117. 

257. Hats, straw, 115. 

French, cultural standards of, Hayes, Rutherford B., 261. 



130. 


Henequen, 116, 117. 


culture imitated, 33. 


Heroism, 40. 


Revolution, 240, 244. 


Hidalgo, Miguel, 84, 240, 243. 


Funerals, 72. 


History, ignorance of, 49. 




HoUdays, list of, 79. 


G 


Homogeneity. See Like-mind- 


Gambling, 91. 


edness. 



Gamio, Manuel, quoted, 16, 175. Honesty, 164, 212, 252. 

Garcia, Juan, Hero of Nacosari, Honor, sense of, 38, 164, 195, 

40. 212. 

Garcia Calderon, F., quoted, 25. Horseback riding, 98. 

Generals, graft of, 255. Horsemanship, 159. 

Germans, as masters, 202. Huerta, Victoriano, 218, 246, 

in trade, 57. 261, 274. 

radical propaganda, 215. Humboldt, Alexander von, 

spy system, 216. quoted, 23, 24, 127, 135. 

Ghosts, 125. Humor, 167, 169 et seq. 

Giddings, F. H., quoted, 233, Hungers, Social. See Social 

234. Hungers. 



I 



Gold, perquisite of Spain, 106. 
Gonzalez Cosio, General, 173. 

Gourds, enamelled, 115. I. W. W., 218, 219. 

Graft, 253 et seq. Illiteracy, 241. 

Grant, Madison, quoted, 45. Imagination, 125, 136, 137, 151, 
Grant, Ulysses S., 260. 162. 

Group morality, 210, 255. Imitation, 32, 107, 138, 238. 

Guanajuato, pottery of, 112. Indifference. See Apathy. 

Guadalajara, pottery of, 113. Indianism, 4, 7, 14, 16, 18, 44, 
Guadalupe Day, 76, 80, 84 et 174, 215, 239. 

seq. Indians, art of, 104. 

Guadalupe, Treaty of, 258. business customs, 54 et seq. 

298 



INDEX 

Indians, craftsmen, 107. ^ 

crisis of, 9. 

culture of, 5, 6, 16, 101, 105, Kidd, Benjamin, quoted, 48. 

126. Kindness, regarded as weakness, 

docility of, 239. 161. 

history of, 238. Kirby-Smith, General, 259. 

"ideals" of, 11. 

legends of, 49. ^ 

mechanics, 141. Labor, control of, 228. 

Mexicanization of, 15. ■ demands of, 219. 

oppressions by, 23. • organization of, 216. 

poets and artists, 102, Land, distribution of, 222. 

126. ■ psychology of ownership, 

psychology of, 6, 7, 8, 23, 199. 

34, 46, 134, 177, 186, 206, Law, attitude toward, 251. 

222, 226, 227, 248, 283. Leadership, 34, 137, 202, 237, 
superstitions of, 50. 250. 

See also Communism. Leather, carved, 120. 

Indiophiles, 44. Le Bon, Gustave, quoted, 253. 

Individualism, 25, 251. Legends, 49. 

Inhibitions, 177, 185. Lerdo de Tejada, Trejo, quoted. 
Instincts, 152 et seq. 287. 

Intellect, domination of, 133, Liberty, conception of, 190. 

150. Liberal Party, 236. 

Intellectual dishonesty, 36. Libraries, 131. 

Intervention, 146, 257 et seq., License, 190. 

272. Like-mindedness, 234. 

Introduction, lette^rs of, 66. Limantour, Jose Ives, 170, 264. 

Introductions, 65. Literature, 128. 

Iron Hand, 237, 238. Logic, 23, 47, 134. 

Isolation, psychological, 31. Love, 155. 

Iturbide, Agustin, 240. Love of home, 188. 

Lust, 152, 153. 
J See also Sex. 

Jai Alai, 99. Lying, 36 et seq., 196. 
James, William, quoted, 139, 

148, 152, 182, 184. M 

Janvier, Thomas A., quoted, 125. MacDougall, WiUiam, quoted, 
Jealousy, 151, 156. 210. 

Juarez, Benito, 243, 260, 281. Madero, Francisco I., 203, 243, 
"Judases," 82. 247, 287. 

Justice, Mexican conception of, Gustavo, 170, 245. 

251 et seq. Maguey, 116. 
299 



THE MEXICAN MIND 



Mail order business, 59. 

Majolica, 110. 

Manana, 41. 

Maqueo Castellanos, quoted, 

188. 
Marcus Aurelius, quoted, 180. 
Mariscal, Ignacio, 263. 
Mastery. See Leadership. 
Maximilian, 203, 241, 259. 
Mechanics, 141. 
Melting Pot, 22. 
Mestizos, as a race, 21. 

culture of, 22, 31, 103, 104. 

definition of, 3. 

psychology of, 14, 30, 43. 

Mexicanization, 15. 
Middle classes, 193. 
"Mind, The Mexican," Chap. 

VI, 133. 
Money, evaluation of, 198. 
Monroe Doctrine, 17, 266 et seq. 
Monterey, 274. 
Moors, art of, 108. 
Morelos, revolution in, 232. 
Motion pictures, 95. 
Murray, John, quoted, 218. 
Music, 122, 168. 

N 
Nacosari, Hero of, 40. 
Nahua Indians, 238. 
Napoleon III, 259. 
National Railways, holidays of, 

79. 

schools of, 32. 

Nationalism, 13. 
NationaUzation of property, 222, 

269. 
Negroes, American, 4, 31. 
Nervous reaction-time, 147. 
New Year, celebration of, 81. 
Newspapers, 131. 
Noche Buena, 87. 



O 

Oaxaca, pottery of, 112. 
Obregon, Alvaro, 11, 170, 218, 

219, 229, 246, 247, 255, 256, 

267, 273, 285. 
Obregon, T. Esquivel. See Es- 

quivel Obregon, T. 
Obrero Mundial, Casa del, 219, 

220. 
Onomdstico, 89. 
Oratory, 168. 

Organization, forms of, 214. 
Orientals, 6, 18. 

See also Yellow World. 
Orizaba, massacre of, 238. 



Painting, 127. 

Indian, 105, 106. 

Pan-Americanism, 267. 

Pani, Albert J., quoted, 280, 281, 

282. 
Passion Plays, 183. 
PaternaUsm. See Patriarchy. 
Patience, 179. 

See also Apathy. 
Patriarchy, 202, 223, 228, 230, 

232. 
Patriotism, 276 et seq., 293. 

See also Tierra. 
Pelota, 99. 
Pebnage, 283. 

See also Patriarchy. 
"People of Mexico, The," 

quoted, 22, 30, 51, 153, 155, 

222, 233, 238. 
Pershing expedition, 261. 
Persia, 43, 108. 
Personahsm, 35, 40, 149, 236, 

237, 256. 
Philippines, 265. 
Pinatas, 86. 



300 



INDEX 



"Playtime in Mexico," Chap. 

IV, 75. 
Plows, 51. 
Poets, 128. 

Politeness, 60, 63 et seq, 196, 224. 
Political opposition, 245. 

parties, 236. 

"Politics, The Cauldron of," 

Chap. X, 235. 
Polo, 97. 
Population, 2, 8. 
Porfirista^, 236. 
Posadas, 86, 124. 
Pottery, 110. 
Poverty, 31. 
Praise, love of, 197. 
Prestige, 38, 198. 

See also Honor. 
Preswpuestos, 141. 
Pride, 191, 193, 268. 
Promenades, 68, 91. 
Property, psychology of, 165. 
Protestantism, 39. 
Pubhc men, absence of, 250. 
Puestos, 82, 86, 114. 
Pulque, 78. 
— — names of shops, 172. 

Q 

Quien sabe? 179, 248. 

R 

Race, 21, 28, 186, 226. 

"Race, The Streams of," Chap. 

1,1. 
Radicalism, 33, 217 et seq., 242, 

272, 275, 282. 

See also Bolshevism. 
Railways, 141. 

See also National Railways. 
Reaction-time, 148. 
Reasoning, types of, 138 et seq. 
Rehozos, 118. 



Recreation. See Chap. IV, 75. 
Red Cross, American, 194. 
"Reds," 220. 
Reform, Laws of, 79. 
Religion, 38. 

See also Church. 
Renaissance, 107 
ResponsibUity, sense of, 180, 226, 

284. 
Restaurants, 96. 
Revolution, American, 2, 240. 

French, 240, 244. 

Revolutions, number of, 243. 
psychology of, 187, 189, 

210, 218 et seq., 281. 
Reyes, Bernardo, 227. 
Ridicule, 169. 
"Rights of Man," 240. 
Roman CathoUc Church. See 

Chiirch, Roman Catholic. 
Romances, 69. 

Romero, Matias, quoted, 180. 
Roque Estrada, quoted, 221. 
Rousseau, J. J., quoted, 210. 
Russia, 217. 

S 

St. Anthony the Abbott, cele- 
bration, 88. 

St. John the Baptist, celebration, 
83. 

SS. Peter and Paul, celebration, 
83. 

Saints' days, personal, 88. 

"San Lunes," 80. 

Schools. See Education. 

Schoolmaster, ridicule of, 171. 

Secretiveness, 163. 

Self-control, 180. 

Self-realization, 148. 

Sensation, as emotion, 152. 

Sensation-impulse, 147. 

Sensitiveness, 195. 



301 



THE MEXICAN MIND 



Serapes, 118. 

Sex, 91, 153 et seg., 188. 

Shops, 56, 58. 

Shyness, 163. 

Siesta, 57. 

Silk, 119. 

Silver working, 121. 

Simpatia, 196. 

Sinverguenza, 38. 

Sixteenth of September, 84, 235. 

Social etiquette, 65. 

Social hungers, 207, 289. 

Social ladder, 229. 

Socialism, 215, 217 et seq., 282. 

Soldiers, psychology of, 189. 

Spain, exhaustion of, 17. 

Spaniards, art of, 107, 126. 

— — codes of, 47. 

colonial methods of, 9, 10, 

14, 24, 27, 175, 239. 

culture of, 24, 101, 104, 126, 

279. 

influence on Mexican cul- 
ture, 104. 

psychology of, 25. 

SpeciaUzation, 207, 288. 

Sports, 97 et seq. 

Sportsmanship, 97, 146. 

Statuettes, 113, 114. 

Stimuli, summation of, 139. 

Stoddard, Lothrop, quoted, 45. 

Story-tellers, 49. 

Stubbornness, 34, 134, 176. 

Stupidity, 140. 

Superstitions, 50, 125. 

Suspicion, 35. 

Sympathy, 159. 

Syndicalism, 216, 217. 



Talavera ware, 110. 
Task system, 178. 
Taxation, fear of, 35. 



"Temperament, The Mexican," 

Chap. II, 21. 
Temper. See Anger. 
TertuUas, 92. 
Texas, 247, 258. 
Theaters, 93. 
"Things Dreamed of," Chap. 

XII, 276. 
Thomas, Rowland, quoted, 140. 
Thomas, W. I., quoted, 76. 
Tierra, Love of, 199, 215, 277, 

279, 280, 293. 
Toledo, 108, 110. 
Tonalan, pottery of, 113. 
"Trading with Mexico," quoted, 

273. 
Traditions, 41, 133, 141, 212, 278. 

adherence to, 34. 

as premises, 46. 

codification of, 13. 

See also Chap. Ill, 46. 
Transiency, law of, 286. 

U 

United States, 17, 22. 

Carranza and, 144. 

Confederacy and, 259. 

constitution of, 240, 241. 

diplomacy, 144 et seq., 265 

et seq. 

destiny of, 257. 

Indian reservations in, 199. 

Juarez and, 260. 

Maximilian and, 259. 

Mexican attitude toward, 

267, 268. 

Philippines, 265. 

propaganda against, 258. 

revolution, 2, 240. 

Treaty of Guadalupe, 258. 

War of 1847, 258. 

See also Monroe Doctrine, 
and Wilson, Woodrow. 



302 



INDEX 



V 

See 



Chap. VIII, 



Valuations. 

176. 

psychological, 43, 147. 

Vera Cruz, occupation of, 261, 

274. 
Vera Estanol, Jorge, 221. 
Viceroys. See Spaniards, colonial 

methods of. 
Vigor, lack of, 179. 
Villa, Francisco, 36, 229, 255. 

W 



Wm. See Chap. VIII, 176. 

types of, 182 et seq. 

WHson, Woodrow, 162, 262, 266. 

Witchcraft, 50. 

Women, Ufe of, 67 et seq. 

Wool, 118. 

Work, methods of, 201, 213. 

"World Without, Mexico and 

The," Chap. XI, 257. 
"Worth While, What Is," Chap. 

VIII, 176. 
Wrestling, 99. 



Y 

Y. M. C. A., 98. 
YeUow World, 17, 18. 
Yucatan, 117, 278. 



Wakes, 73. 

Wallas, Graham, quoted, 174. 

Wants, psychological. See De- 
sires. 

Weaving, 117. Z 

"What Is Worth WhHe," Chap. Zarapes, 118. 
VIII, 176. Zarzuelas, 94. 

Wheelbarrows, 52. Zocalo, decorations of, 79. 

White World, 4, 10, 17, 18, 19, Zubaran Capmany, Rafael, 219, 
102. 220. 



THE END 



303 



3W7 



